Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday state legislation to protect the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A from discrimination.
The legislation—Senate Bill 1978, dubbed the “Save Chick-fil-A” bill—specifically prohibits local governments in the state “from retaliating against anyone based on their affiliation or support of a religious organization,” according to KEYE-TV, the CBS affiliate in Austin, Texas.
The legislation came in response to the San Antonio City Council in March banning the San Antonio International Airport from leasing space to Chick-fil-A because of what critics said was the fast-food chain’s “legacy of anti-LGBT behavior,” NBC News reported.
Roberto Trevino, a member of the City Council, said that the council was justified in banning the fast-food chain from the airport.
“San Antonio is a city full of compassion, and we do not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior,” Trevino said. “Everyone has a place here, and everyone should feel welcome when they walk through our airport.”
Equality Texas, an LGBTQ gtoup in Texas, criticized the new state law, tweeting that it was an “anti-LGBTQ dog whistle,” saying it would “advance the message that anti-LGBTQ views deserve special protections.”
Some Democratic state lawmakers said they were opposed to the bill because they thought it would promote discrimination.
“Religious freedom, at different times in our nation’s history, has been twisted to justify discrimination, to justify slavery,” said state Rep. Chris Turner, who leads the House Democratic Caucus. “Religious liberty is being used to justify discrimination.”
“We can’t discriminate against one in order to protect the other,” said state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, the second openly LGBT member to be elected to the Texas Legislature, according to DallasNews.com. “The scariest part of this bill … is the individuals who will take this bill and use your vote for this bill to perpetuate hate.”
Weeks before signing the legislation, Abbott, a second-term Republican, telegraphed on Twitter that he supported it.
So. What are the odds I’ll sign the Chick-fil-A bill?
A former member of the Virginia House of Delegates won the Democrat primary for the state senate Tuesday night, even though he was jailed four years ago for having sex with a minor whom he later married.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) slammed far-left New York Times writer Wajahat Ali on Tuesday after Ali mocked the notion that Republicans like Crenshaw were "patriots" and falsely claimed that Crenshaw did not support the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund.
Let’s face it: Donald Trump isn’t exactly popular in Mexico. His rhetoric regarding the border and immigration crisis has made him a bit of a piñata to our southern neighbor, with figures including former Mexican President Vicente Fox lining up to take jabs against Trump since he took office. But something may be changing. First,…
CNN’s Jim Acosta — in an attempt to push his new book — might’ve made the single-most absurd remark in the history of words that have exited his mouth. And that’s saying something. According to The Daily Caller, in a Monday evening interview with CNN colleague Anderson Cooper, Acosta was questioned about his new book,…
A new study by Israeli researchers claims Hezbollah finances its terror operations and sidesteps US sanctions by overseeing the illicit drug trade from South America to Europe. From the Times of Israel:
“These Hezbollah operatives are actually overseeing all the illicit finance and the drug trafficking activities, not just in Europe, but in South America, the Tri-Border region, moving about $200 million a month,” said former US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Derek Maltz.
The study said Hezbollah personnel act as middlemen in the global drug route from South America to West Africa and from there to Europe, helping get hundreds of tons of cocaine and other drugs through ports in Belgium and Germany — with only 5-10 percent of it being intercepted.
“Our study links Hezbollah’s political wing with its military wing, and we went down to the field level and are showing how all the drug trafficking system supports money laundering,” Cohen said. “At least 20%-25% of the [profit] goes back to Hezbollah and is used for arming, weapon purchases, salaries and more.”
As it happens, we know one of the things Hezbollah militants were apparently spending some of that drug money on: Ice packs. Sunday the Telegraph reported that Hezbollah was caught stockpiling bomb-making materials, in the form of ice packs, in north London. This was apparently part of a larger plot to carry out terror attacks around the globe:
Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed hoards of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate, an ingredient commonly used to make home made bombs.
The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in 2015 but the public and MPs were kept in the dark, according to The Daily Telegraph.
Three tonnes of the dangerous substance was found in its raw form and police eventually arrested one man on suspicion of plotting terrorism – but released him without charge…
Sources told the paper that the pattern of behavior from those linked to the group suggested a wider operation, after a similar find was made in Thailand and a New York-based member appeared to seek out a foreign ice pack manufacturer.
CNSNews reports a British MP has sent a letter asking why the discovery of such a large amount of bomb-making materials was kept from the public in 2015 and whether that had something to do with keeping the Iran Deal on track:
Joan Ryan, an independent member of the House of Commons, asked Home Secretary Sajid Javid in a letter Monday why details of the September 2015 raid had not been made public.
“Can you confirm that nobody in Government ordered this information to be withheld from the public because of its sensitivity due to Iran’s funding and support for Hezbollah and the recent conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal?” she asked.
Ryan, who for years campaigned for Britain to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group – in its entirety, rather than just its purported “military wing” – also wanted to know why the government resisted that move until early this year, even though it was aware in 2015 of its apparent terrorist plotting in the U.K.
It definitely seems odd that such a major terror-connected discovery would be kept quiet just months after the Iran Deal was wrapped up and months before the prisoner (and cash) swap in January 2016.
Update: Here’s a Ted Talk on how those instant ice packs work. There are only two ingredients inside them: water and ammonium nitrate.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4) introduced legislation Tuesday to repeal the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA) so teachers can carry guns for defense of themselves and their students.
The GFSZA was passed in 1990 and Massie introduced legislation in 2017 and 2018 in hopes of repealing it.
During the 2017 repeal attempt Massie said, “Gun-free school zones are ineffective. They make people less safe by inviting criminals into target-rich, no-risk environments. Gun-free zones prevent law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves, and create vulnerable populations that are targeted by criminals.”
And on February 16, 2018, Massie told Breitbart News, “Gun-free zones are invitations to deranged criminals. Why on earth would we have a federal law to advertise our schools as such? The 1990 law has done absolutely nothing to improve school safety, and should be repealed because it makes schools less safe.”
School shootings have been all too common under the auspices of the GFSZA. The nation has witnessed Columbine (April 20, 1999), Santana High School (March 5, 2001), Rocori High School (September 24, 2003), Red Lake Senior High School (March 21, 2005), Platte Canyon High School (September 27, 2006), Sandy Hook (December 14, 2012), Sparks Middle School (March 21, 2013), Arapahoe High School (December 13, 2013), Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (February 14, 2018), Sante Fe High School (May 18, 2018), and many others.
Attackers know they face no armed resistance in a gun-free zone.
Massie’s bill is titled the Safe Students Act.
Andrew Pollack, father of Parkland shooting victim Meadow Pollack, spoke to Breitbart News about Massie’s efforts against gun-free zones, saying, “When there’s a shooting, lives are lost during every second we have to wait for police to arrive. When seconds count, we need an instant response. This isn’t hard. Law-abiding citizens have the right to defense themselves against the evil that will always target exposed gun-free zones.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
Democratic Senator Pat Leahy bluntly told GOP Senators that Democrats are blocking $4.5 billion needed to manage the Central American migration emergency until Republicans submit to their pro-migration demands.
“We’re willing to put [up] the money,” the Vermont Senator said at the June 11 hearing at the Senate’s judiciary committee. But, he added:
Now whether a supplemental gets done is up to the administration. If they continue to block bipartisan legislation, nothing happens. I hope the Republicans will finally realize we have to do this, Republicans and Democrats, together … We want long term solutions.
The May 1 funding request sought $3.3 billion to process and temporarily house many thousands of so-called “Unaccompanied Alien Children,” plus $2.2 billion for border agencies to register, shelter, and transport the huge flow of migrants as they walk through the catch-and-release loopholes at the border.
“The border is at its breaking point — we need funds,” said Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
GOP Senators are expected to push for Senate passage of the legislation mid-June. But the package still needs approval from at least seven Democratic Senators, plus the House’s Democratic leadership.
The legislators at the hearing did not debate the gains from President Donald Trump’s diplomatic deal with Mexico. His deal promises to end the migration by preventing migrants from getting U.S. jobs to pay their smuggling debts.
In contrast, the political priorities set by Democrats would likely accelerate the movement of Central American populations into blue-collar Americans’ workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. The huge inflow — perhaps one million people in the 12 months up to October — provides an economic stimulus to cities run by Democratic mayors and to companies run by Democratic donors.
One of the Democrats’ priorities is taxpayer funding to hire lawyers for the illegal immigrants in the United States who hire coyotes to accompany their children up to U.S. border agencies.
A 2008 law requires the government agencies to complete these coyotes’ contracts by relaying the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” from the coyotes at the border up to the shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Once at the HHS shelters, the children and youths are next relayed to so-called “sponsors.” Many of the sponsors are the illegal-immigrant parents who hired the coyotes to accompany their UACs to the U.S. border.
“Most children are being released to parents, but parents are here unlawfully,” McAleenan noted, adding that he wants legal authority for his agencies to share information about the identity of the parent “sponsors.”
The requirement that taxpayer-funded lawyers be provided to the UAC migrants is included in a bill introduced June 5 by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “This bill includes a key component of [Democrat] Sen. [Mazie] Hirono’s bill, which provides counsel for unaccompanied children,” Feinstein told the hearing.
The Central American families are fleeing “violence, abuse, and poverty,” she claimed, despite many statements from many migrants that they are hoping to get low-wage U.S. jobs, send their children to American schools, and get healthcare treatments.
Hirono argued that taxpayers should also provide more funding to Central America. “We do need to get to the root cause … This is a long term kind of commitment on our part … We’re not doing enough to get to the root cause.”
Leahy argued that Democrats are willing to provide funding to help the Central American migrants gain “refuge” in the United States.
We support ensuring that [the department of Health and Human Service] can care for unaccompanied minors. We support ensuring that [U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency] can safely process migrants who are seeking refuge. We just want basic standards of humanitarian care.
Democrats downplayed the economic incentives for migrants to walk through the establishment’s catch-and-release loopholes into the United States, and they sought to blame the migration on President Donald Trump’s pro-American policies.
Trump’s policies “are a certifiable failure,” said Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin, who has strongly opposed Trump’s proposed reforms in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
“We have learned that we cannot count on this admin to work on rational immigration policy,” said Durbin, who has pushed for multiple amnesties, and was a participant in the disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill.
Democrats, including Durbin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, argued that the migration problem would have been solved by the 2013 Gang of Eight bill.
The bill added tens of billions in extra funding for the border agencies. But it did not close the catch-and-release loopholes and it invited so many millions of foreign workers into the labor market that it would have shifted more of the nation’s annual new income from employees to the Wall Street investors.
“The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” said a June 2013 report by the Congressional Budget Office, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Republicans pushed back against the Democrats’ opposition to border funding and border reforms.
“We’ve seen no willingness on the part of our Democratic colleagues to meet us halfway,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn. The migration “is just getting worse and worse as Congress sits on its hands” instead of passing legal reforms to block the loopholes. Legislators “have been AWOL, and that is shameful.”
“They need to step up because even The New York Times said ‘Give Trump the money,”’ GOP Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell told a Tuesday press conference.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
The National Review has a new plan for social media users to fight back against censorship — deleting your account.
The National Review published an article recently titled “Close Your Social-Media Accounts,” in which the publication argues that in order to fight back against censorship, social media users should just ignore the problem entirely. The Review points out that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are optional, and as such any users worried about being censored should just remove themselves from the platform entirely.
National Review writer Sam Sweeney writes in his article:
Of course, I thought. If Twitter had been conceived of and marketed as Chicken Soup for Our Collective National Soul, no one would question its right to ban content it deemed contrary to that vision. So why do we get upset about censorship now? Because insofar as social-media platforms have become extensions of our very beings, censorship of our lives on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is a violation of our freedom of speech. What is speech if it’s not on Facebook?
For me the question isn’t whether the government should regulate social-media outlets, or whether they should be treated like utilities, or whether the outlets themselves should adopt a First Amendment principle voluntarily, or whether they should de-platform views outside the mainstream or outside their own woke visions of society. My question is instead: Does this debate mean, on a moral level, that we now treat our social-media platforms as extensions of ourselves? How else could restrictions on our social-media activity be construed as a violation of the First Amendment? As Jonah Goldberg points out, any publication already censors anyone it chooses not to publish. In no way does that restrict free speech. No one could plausibly say that being rejected by National Review was a violation of his free speech. Facebook censoring a post is a violation of free speech only if my profile is me and I am my profile.
The writer notes that he deleted his own social media account and had a positive experience despite being on the platform since 2005. But, the same writer also admits to scanning Twitter on a regular basis despite not having an account on the platform.
Admittedly, I enjoy reading social media. I spend a lot of time scanning Twitter despite not having an account. Too much time, I confess. I did set up an Instagram account recently after I started to learn photography. I made a decision not to post personal things there, only my professional photographs, but I’m already thinking of deleting it. I like that when I meet someone new in person, I am a blank slate in their eyes. Or I am a friend of a friend, or a former colleague of a classmate, etc. I am not those photos from 2007 that I wish I could make disappear. I realize there are ways to restrict photos. Many photos I am in have been posted without my knowing, but those are not all in one place for the world to see. I am not merely a series of images in chronological order all compiled in one virtual location whose security depends on the benevolence and competence of a few guys and gals in Silicon Valley. How long until a social-justice-warrior employee at Facebook starts leaking the off-color jokes in private messages sent by people he doesn’t like?
The writer then suggests that users should just delete their accounts, calling it the “21st-century equivalent of becoming a cloistered monk.”
My advice: Delete your Facebook, yesterday. Don’t get your news from Twitter. The issues of free speech on social media will no longer matter to you. They don’t matter to me. I’ve made a decision not to subjugate myself to the whims of our new overlords. They can open their platform to everyone from neo-Nazis to Kim Jong-un, or they can have a litmus test that includes denouncing Donald Trump or the pope at regular intervals — a sort of school-bathroom pass fitting for our generation’s extended adolescence in which Mark Zuckerberg plays the schoolmarm. It won’t affect my life either way. In my own mind at least, I am free because these things no longer define my life. I am happier as a result. I can still read a book of some length, an ability I see dropping off sharply among my peers.
Not having Facebook is the 21st-century equivalent of becoming a cloistered monk. If I can just stop opening Twitter, I will feel like I’ve replaced Saint Simeon on his pillar. Monastic jokes aside, let me tell you: Life doesn’t end when you close your social-media accounts. In fact, the day you close them is the day your life truly begins again.
Breitbart News writer Allum Bokhari previously discussed the National Review’s funding from Google in an article titled “Sundar Pichai Confirms Google Gave Money to National Review Institute.”
Bokhari writes:
Pichai used his written answers to congressional questions to disclose his company’s donation to the National Review Institute, which was revealed by National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg last year. The Google CEO confirmed the donation, stating that it was made in 2018 and would, therefore, be disclosed in the company’s next report.
“Google has a long history of supporting organizations on all sides of the political spectrum,” said Pichai. “Google was one of several corporate sponsors of the National Review Institute’s William F. Buckley Prize Dinner in 2018, which is scheduled to be reported in our upcoming transparency report.”
But the National Review Institute’s website states that it received a donation from Google a year earlier, in 2017. This donation was not disclosed in Google’s transparency report for that year.
Google’s contributions to the National Review Institutewere brought to light by a report in the left-leaning technology magazine Wired, which detailed a number of the tech giant’s contributions to establishment conservative institutions in order to fend off tech regulation from Republicans. Other organizations funded by Google include the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
Bokhari notes that the National Review has actually published articles by a senior member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute arguing against Google antitrust measures:
National Review subsequently published an article from a senior member of the CEI, arguing against the use of antitrust legislation to break up Google and other big tech companies. The article was published four months after the National Review Institute’s 2017 William F. Buckley Prize Dinner, which as the Institute’s own website discloses, was sponsored by Google among other companies.
National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg admitted to the Google funding in an article following a Twitter exchange with One America News correspondent Emerald Robinson last year, in which she criticized the links between Goldberg’s magazine and big tech.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
