With gun controller Andy Beshear now occupying the Kentucky governor’s office, numerous counties have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries.
The Lexington Herald-Leaderreports that Cumberland, Harlan, Leslie, and Letcher Counties, among others, have made the declarations to show they will not be enforcing any new gun controls instituted by Beshear or the federal government.
The Herald-Leader noted a rousing speech by David Johnson at the Letcher County declaration meeting, wherein he said:
Tonight, I feel that we the people of Letcher County, and not just Letcher County but the state of Kentucky, and not just the state of Kentucky but of these United States of America, can stand up as law abiding citizens and proclaim that we are constitutional to the bitter end.
On December 18, 2019, Breitbart News reported that 86 of Virginia’s 95 counties had declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries as well. The 86 counties are presenting a united front to incoming Democrats, who take control of the state’s legislature next week. Those Democrats are led by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who has made clear that a war on guns is part of his agenda.
One of Northam’s main efforts is to force AR-15 owners to either register their rifles with the government or hand them over.
George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams responded to Northam’s push by warning Virginians not be fooled by “a registration trick.” Williams said, “Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation.”
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.
Conservative talk radio star Mark Levin rebuked claims that President Donald Trump required Congressional approval for the U.S.’s deadly airstrike on Iran’s top military commander, stating the president didn’t need to notify Democrats because they are “orchestrating a coup” against him.
“Trump didn’t confer with Congress? Uh, Congress has been on recess. Moreover, the House Intelligence Committee has spent months orchestrating a coup against our president rather than doing its job protecting America from, among others, the terrorist regime in Iran,” Levin wrote on social media Friday morning. “But a president is not required to alert Congress to a real-time defensive military action. So Pelosi and her ilk can leak and put the military action at risk? These Democrats are undermining our security. We were attacked by the Iranian regime.”
2. But a president is not required to alert Congress to a real-time defensive military action. So Pelosi and her ilk can leak and put the military action at risk? These Democrats are undermining our security. We were attacked by the Iranian regime.
Early Friday morning, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations unit, was killed by U.S. forces at Baghdad’s main airport.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the deadly strike came in response to intelligence that Soleimani was plotting an imminent attack on U.S. citizens.
“He was actively plotting in the region to take actions — a big action, as he described it — that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk,” Pompeo told CNN’s New Day.
“We know it was imminent,” the secretary of state added. “This was an intelligence-based assessment that drove our decision-making process.”
Among those perturbed that President Trump did not notify Congress of the strike was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who called on lawmakers to be “immediately briefed on this serious situation.”
“American leaders’ highest priority is to protect American lives and interests. But we cannot put the lives of American servicemembers, diplomats and others further at risk by engaging in provocative and disproportionate actions,” Pelosi said in a statement.” Tonight’s airstrike risks provoking further dangerous escalation of violence. America – and the world – cannot afford to have tensions escalate to the point of no return.”
“The full Congress must be immediately briefed on this serious situation and on the next steps under consideration by the Administration, including the significant escalation of the deployment of additional troops to the region,” the speaker added.
The world has awoken today a safer and more just place. And the unraveling of former President Barack Obama’s pro-Iran regional Middle East realignment, which began with President Donald Trump’s thunderous exit from his predecessor’s pro-ayatollah nuclear capitulation, has now reached its logical conclusion.
The Obama Middle East foreign policy legacy is dead. As is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s infamous jihadist mastermind, Qassem Soleimani.
Good riddance to both.
It is difficult to overstate the geopolitical and strategic ramifications of Soleimani’s long-overdue demise. Aside from Osama bin Laden himself, no leading international jihadist thug has had more American blood on his hands than the decades-long veteran commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) — a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and umbrella organization overseeing so much regional and global evil, from Iraq to Yemen to Syria to Lebanon to Gaza to European capitals to our very own westernhemisphere. From Hezbollah to Hamas to Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Yemeni Houthi rebels to (contra Iranian propaganda) al-Qaeda itself, the extraterritorial tentacles of the inherently jihadist Iranian regime are simply ubiquitous.
No nation on Earth funds, sponsors, and exports more genocidal jihad than the Islamic Republic of Iran. And no one has been more responsible for that over the past 20-plus years than Qassem Soleimani. The Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran is thus correct when he writes today that, “[t]he killings of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, were certainly meaningful, but they were also largely symbolic.” By contrast, Doran continues, “[t]aking out the architect of the Islamic Republic’s decades-long active campaign of violence against the United States and its allies, especially Israel, represents a tectonic shift in Middle Eastern politics.”
Soleimani, who was designated and sanctioned by the U.N., E.U., and U.S. alike, directly approved Tuesday’s U.S. embassy storming in Baghdad by Iranian proxy militia Kataib Hezbollah, and was credibly assessed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as actively planning more “imminent” attacks against hard American assets in the Middle East, has been directly active in the mass murder of Americans. He personally oversaw the mass arming of Shiite Iraqi insurgents and it is estimated that the IRGC-QF targeted and killed over 600 Americans in Iraq from 2003–2011. The State Department asserts that this personally amounts to a whopping 17% of all deaths of U.S. military personnel during the Iraq War. As Iraq War veteran Jesse Kelly tweeted, “If you’ve been to a VA hospital in recent years and seen a young man missing limbs, there’s a reasonable chance Qasem Soleimani is responsible for it.”
Qassem Soleimani was a monstrous thug. In addition to the hundreds of Americans killed in Iraq via Iranian-supplied roadside IEDs, Soleimani personally oversaw the jihad-led destabilization of all nations within Tehran’s coveted “Shiite crescent” of desired regional hegemony. He likely is responsible, on net, for tens of thousands of deaths. He was a relentless and unceasing foe of Western civilization, more broadly, though he held a special disdain for the mullahs’ “Little Satan” of Israel and “Great Satan” of the United States.
Totalitarian regimes the world over crave Obama administration-style trepidation and appeasement. Sharks, alas, are always on the prowl for bloodletting weaklings. But it takes righteousness to refuse to be cowed by revanchist thuggery; it takes resolve to stake one’s ground; and it takes willpower to defend one’s carefully calibrated strategic interests.
The only travesty here is that Qassem Soleimani was not taken out sooner. The president of the United States deserves kudos for having the courage to execute this strike. America and her allies are today safer and stronger for it. A small portion of justice has been served, and there is no more deserving target of that rough justice than mastermind Iranian jihadist Qassem Soleimani.
Swedish police in the city of Växjö were attacked by a gang of up to 15 youths armed with Molotov cocktails after they arrested two people for drunk driving on New Year’s Eve.
According to Evelina Olsson, spokeswoman for the South Region police, one police officer had flammable liquid on his clothing but none of the officers were injured, Swedish newspaper Expressenreports.
The attackers immediately fled the scene following the incident which occurred at around 11pm. According to Olsson, no arrests were made but an investigation into rioting was launched.
The Swedish capital of Stockholm was relatively calm on New Year’s Eve except for a notable incident in the “vulnerable” no-go suburb of Husby where police were attacked with rockets and firecrackers. Elsewhere in Stockholm police say a woman reported being raped and was taken to a local hospital.
The most serious incidents occurred in Vinslöv north of Hässleholm and saw a 34-year-old man brutally beaten and stabbed by several attackers, and in Trollhättan where another man had been seriously stabbed. No suspects were arrested in either of the two incidents.
France: Hundreds of Cars Torched and Police Attacked Over New Year’s https://t.co/c1UAKKL9rL
Last year, Sweden also saw an attempted murder in Haninge municipality along with attacks on police officers by youths armed with fireworks in Kristianstad. Around 17 cars were also set on fire in Gothenburg.
The city of Växjö, where the molotov attack took place this week, made headlines in 2018 after the local Muslim community demanded the right to publically broadcast the call to prayer with local Imam Ismail Abu Helal stating: “Muslims are not visitors in Växjö, we live here.” The request was later granted by police several months later.
France, which has a history of car burnings over New Year’s Eve, recorded hundreds of cars being set on fire during the night, including 220 cars in the city of Strasbourg and 127 in Besançon.
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJor email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com
If you don’t like the sound of that ‘we’, fine, I’ll take ’em on my own. But I suspect that quite a few of you feel as angry about this thing as I do. The Green Blob — aka the Climate Industrial Complex — is one of the most insidiously dangerous and oppressive forces in the world today and it’s time we hit back hard.
Green ideology is evil. It’s killing our jobs, it’s brainwashing our kids (and stealing their future), it’s despoiling our landscapes, it’s murdering our wildlife, it’s corrupting honest science, it’s enriching the most disgusting, cynical people in crony capitalism, it’s driving up the cost of living, it’s holding back our economies, it’s hamstringing business, it’s burning our homes…
How dare these nauseating green zealots try to lecture us on how to save the planet when they’re the ones doing so much of the harm!
Latest case in point are the bush fires ravaging Australia. Every month, every week, every day practically, there’s a story somewhere in the world that captures the wanton idiocy of the green movement.
As I demonstrate pretty comprehensively here, the Australian bush fires have nothing to do with climate change. The reason they are so widespread and intense, rather, is the result of misguided green policy. (So you can see why the greenies might be wanting to distract from this by pointing the blame elsewhere).
But you’d be amazed – or rather you probably wouldn’t, actually – how many supposedly intelligent people have chosen to buy into and promulgate the lie.
Here in the UK, for example, is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell.
Two photos from Australia yesterday seem to symbolise our collective problem with climate change. pic.twitter.com/r9bouHSR3A
Here is conservative journalist Daniel Johnson, son of legendary lefty-turned-right-wing author, journalist and polymath Paul, mystifying readers of his online conservative imprint The Article by ‘arguing’ that the bush fires are a sign we should abandon fossil fuels.
Australians cannot be blamed for the much larger climate impact of huge economies such as China, India and the US. But the bushfires do feel like a turning point. Coal represents only a small proportion of Australia’s energy and mineral resource exports: less than 10 per cent of a total of $278 billion. Does it really make sense to invest heavily in a sector that is not only environmentally damaging but may not have a long-term future?
A national debate is urgently needed about how those who depend on the extraction industries can be reconciled with those who do not, so that a new consensus can be built that protects both Australia’s unique ecology and its prosperity. Australians must listen to the voice of conscience that speaks from their burning bush. So, too, as we contemplate the tragic loss of flora and fauna, should the rest of humanity.
Here is a cartoon from the newspaper at least formerly read by the Establishment – the Times of London.
Oh and here – because, of course you were all dying to get Hollywood’s take on this – is Bette Midler:
Pity the poor #Australians, their country ablaze, and their rotten @ScottMorrisonMP saying, “This is not the time to talk about Climate Change. We have to grow our economy.” What an idiot. What good is an economy in an uninhabitable country? Lead, you fuckwit!!
Obviously, if we try to list all the influential public figures – aka useful idiots – who are ignorantly and irresponsibly promoting the climate scare we’d be here for many months.
But that’s exactly my point. Green groupthink is now so dominant in Western Culture that it’s starting to feel like the final scene in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. None of the useful idiots I’ve just singled out above, well, not the top three at least, is remotely stupid. Yet each has found it convenient not to do his homework, to ignore the facts and glibly promulgate the climate change narrative regardless of the actual evidence. Truly climate change is the new Western religion; and as zealous and intolerant of heresy as any of the old religions.
And I think the time has come for us to stop letting these people get a free ride. Whether they are full-on enviro-loon activists like Extinction Rebellion or merely fellow travellers of convenience on the green gravy train, we need to stop indulging them and make it clear that what they are doing to our civilisation, our economies, and our freedoms is unacceptable.
Let me give you another example of the scale of the problem and the urgency of the need for a counter-revolution, courtesy of writer, journalist and zoologist Matt Ridley.
Matt — who sits in the House of Lords as Lord Ridley — is one of only a handful of figures in public life who has dared to take on the Green Blob.
In this article for Reaction Life he describes a recent guest appearance on the BBC’s flagship political news show, Radio 4’s Today programme. Ridley was only there on sufferance: because four guest-editor slots had been given to greenies and lefties, including Greta Thunberg, the BBC permitted one solitary show to be guest-edited by a Conservative journalist Charles Moore.
Ridley made some good points about the climate change scare, all of them factually accurate. But in the interests of ‘balance’, the BBC then interviewed a professional climate alarmist — former government chief science advisor Sir David King — who was allowed to spout a load of eco-propaganda nonsense, unchallenged.
I sat there open-mouthed as he beautifully demonstrated my point with one exaggeration after another. He said that Europe’s dash for diesel had nothing to do with greens, when green pressure groups pushed actively for it. He said that we will see 1-2 metres of sea level rise this century, when the current rate of rise is 3.4 millimetres a year with no acceleration (or 0.3 metres per century). He said that all of Greenland’s ice cap might melt and could cause 5-6 metres of sea level rise, though at current rates of melting, Greenland’s ice cap will be 99% intact in 2100. He said that wild fires were being caused by trees dying out because of rising temperatures, rather than a failure to manage increasingly luxuriant vegetation in fire-risk areas leading to a build up of tinder. He said scientists are agreed that Calcutta will have to be moved, when the Ganges delta is actually expanding in area, not shrinking.
So here you have a significant problem: Britain’s de facto state broadcaster, still taken seriously by a worrying percentage of the population, is pumping out not environmental news but pure green propaganda. And almost no one is correcting it or gainsaying it.
But it gets worse. Normally, you might expect the print media – at least the conservative print media – to counter the BBC’s relentlessly leftist green narrative. It rarely does though because its editors are running scared.
What readers of newspapers and listeners to the radio do not see is the sustained and deliberate pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line on climate change. Take Bob Ward, who works at the London School of Economics, where his salary is paid by a billionaire, Jeremy Grantham. Ward is not employed to do research, but to “communicate” climate science. He chooses to interpret this as a duty to put pressure on the media to censor people like me. He complains to the Times almost every time I mention climate change, often getting his facts wrong, and kicked up a huge fuss when the Times, after publishing half a dozen of his letters declined to publish another one.
Recently he has taken to complaining to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. Whenever Charles Moore, James Delingpole, David Rose, the late Christopher Booker, I or any other journalist writes an article arguing against exaggerated climate alarmism in one of the newspapers self-regulated by IPSO, he sends in a detailed and lengthy complaint. He never complains about the myriad alarmist mistakes that appear all the time like articles saying that “the science” tells us six billion people are going to die soon because of climate change.
Yes. Can confirm. Britain is a country that prides itself on its robust, fearless free press. Yet in the field of the environment and climate change it has sold the pass completely: in some cases because the editors and writers are already fully onboard with the green narrative, in others because they are not prepared to go through the hassle of yet another vexatious complaint submitted to IPSO.
Think of all those stories British newspapers ran last year standing up to bullying billionaires like Sir Philip Green, railing against ‘gagging orders’ — and then congratulating themselves on their own crusading courage.
So how come they’re prepared to give another billionaire — one who doesn’t even live in the UK — Jeremy Grantham, carte blanche effectively to gag the UK print media on the entire field of climate change?
Britain’s newspapers are guilty here not just of cowardice, but of something even more reprehensible in the media: repeatedly misunderstanding and misrepresenting one of the biggest stories of our age.
Just to return briefly to Australian bush fires story — because it’s the most recent — why aren’t the correspondents of the Mail, the Telegraph, the Times and the Sun all over it, reporting on every last detail of this crying global scandal: the warnings over a period of decades from experts in forest management; the green activists deliberately preventing controlled burning; the arsonists — quite possibly motivated by eco-activism — the total, utter lack of evidence showing any connection with climate change?
Environmentalism, never forget, is a totalitarian ideology inimical to the freedoms and prosperity of Western Civilisation. Our media, our elites, our politicians are betraying us hideously on this most important of issues. They are allowing a small but shrill minority of green activists and bent scientists to get away with murder by permitting their lies to go unchallenged.
My mission in 2020 is to blow this scam wide open. I’m shortly going to be announcing a project with which you might want to help me…
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on Friday cheered the United States’ military strike against Iranian top military commander Qasem Soleimani as a victory for the safety of the American people.
“The death of Qasem Soleimani is a big victory for the safety of the American people,” Sen. Lee said in a statement. “As always, I am anxious to learn about the legal justification for this action, and look forward to being briefed by the Pentagon and the White House.”
Sen. Lee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) serve as two of the Senate’s most vocal supporters of President Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy vision, wherein America focuses less on foreign interventionism and more on rebuilding America.
Lee and Paul worked to pass a War Powers Act resolution to express disapproval of the United States’ backing of Saudia Arabia’s war in Yemen.
Paul said Friday that American troops deserve better than an undeclared war with Iran as the result of the military strike against Soleimani.
As Breitbart News reported, the Kentucky conservative wrote:
President Trump viscerally understands that the toppling of Saddam Hussein made Iran stronger. Soleimani, like Hussein, was an evil man who ordered the killing of Americans. Yet, the question remains, whether his death will lead to more instability in the Middle East or less. The question today is whether the assassination of Soleimani will expand the war to endanger the lives of every American soldier or diplomat in the Middle East?
“If we are to go to war w/ Iran the Constitution dictates that we declare war. A war without a Congressional declaration is a recipe for feckless intermittent eruptions of violence w/ no clear mission for our soldiers,” Sen. Paul added via Twitter. “Our young men and women in the armed services deserve better.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
An Oklahoma man on methamphetamine went on an exceptional trip Wednesday morning, Tulsa CBS affiliate KOTV reported.
First, cops say Brandon Kirby, 40, stole a pickup truck that was parked at an adult video store in Carthage, Mo., according to Tulsa FOX affiliate KOKI. The car had two passengers, one man asleep in the passenger’s seat and that man’s pet goat, chilling in the bed of the truck, but Kirby was undeterred.
The abducted man and his pet goat had been waiting in the truck while the driver went shopping inside the store, KOTV reported. When the man woke up, Kirby held him at gunpoint and pistol whipped him.
Kirby proceeded to ingest methamphetamine and drive the car from Carthage, about 150 miles south of Kansas City in Missouri’s southwest corner, through Kansas and into Oklahoma, KOKI reported. In rural Creek County, Okla., Kirby decided having company was overrated and dropped the man — and the goat — on the side of the road. This proved to be a mistake, as the man called 911.
Shutting down the refugee resettlement scam and transformation of our communities was one of Trump’s campaign promises. Unfortunately, when it comes to the key issues that propelled Trump into office, elected Republicans side with Democrats. Nowhere is this more evident than on the issue of refugee resettlement.
Last week, I reported that, despite record illegal immigration draining resources in the states, 15 GOP governors requested refugee resettlement, after the State Department required their consent in order for contractors to begin resettling in a given jurisdiction. Now, as conservatives remain complacent in this fight, 18 GOP governors have requested resettlement:
As you can see, most of these governors reside in states Trump carried by overwhelming margins. That is the result of Trump voters lulled into a false sense of security that Trump alone can stop the open-borders movement. However, the other elected GOP officials have not become more Trumpian in recent years.
Not only are GOP governors consenting to refugee resettlement, but even Republican-controlled counties are lining up for the social transformation. Pursuant to Trump’s executive order, refugees cannot be settled in a given county without the consent of the county’s governing body, in addition to the governor’s overall statewide consent. While most counties have remained silent, Twin Falls County, Idaho, just sent its consent to the State Department. Trump carried this county by 46 points, the same margin by which he carried Burleigh County, North Dakota, another red county that agreed to resettle more refugees. Who needs Democrats?
Just nine of the 27 GOP governors remain on the sidelines, and none have definitively rejected resettlement. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is the biggest remaining fish, given that Texas has been the largest refugee resettlement state. How hard could it be for him to announce that in light of record high illegal immigration straining local Texas communities beyond belief this year, the state will not accept more refugees? Remember, what we must deal with from south of the border is just as costly as refugee resettlement and greater in numbers than what Europe deals with in terms of either refugees or illegal immigration. It makes no sense to bring in more people from another hemisphere when we are dealing with our own refugee problem from Central America.
Shame on these governors for opting to join Open Borders Inc. and subjecting their citizens to more social transformation and the fiscal cost of endless third world immigration. But shame on us if they continue to get re-elected. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Gary Herbert of Utah, Jim Justice of West Virginia, Eric Holcomb of Indiana, Phil Scott of Vermont, and Mike Parsons of Missouri are all up for re-election this year. The primaries are just a few months away. If conservatives can’t even oust RINO governors in states Trump carried by wide margins, like West Virginia, Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, and Indiana, then there is no future for us in the Republican Party.
Opting out of open borders is our version of a Brexit vote. Are we going to allow the U.N., State Department bureaucrats, and private self-serving taxpayer-funded contractors to transform our neighborhoods with transnational gangs and dozens of foreign languages in our school systems, or will we seize control of our own destiny? Trump gave us that vote by allowing states and counties to decide, but only one side is getting involved.
Trump further has an obligation to make it clear to his voters that if candidates emerge to challenge the open-borders incumbent Republicans, then he will back the challengers and not the incumbents, as he has unfortunately been doing until now. Trump endorsed most of these governors. It’s time he uses his bully pulpit to call them out.
The lesson of this one-sided refugee fight is that while voters changed the face of the Republican Party by electing Trump, no progress has been made down the ballot to send in reinforcements. By Trump signaling that he will always endorse the incumbent, he is dissuading his most ardent supporters from even challenging these swamp creatures. If Trump wants to win re-election and actually implement his agenda, he must empower his supporters to get involved, not sabotage his own agenda by empowering Benedict Arnolds.
U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley Sector arrested a previously deported child sex offender after he illegally crossed from Mexico. The arrest happened near a school zone in the same county of his previous conviction.
Brownsville Station Border Patrol agents observed an illegal alien jumping a fence near a Texas school. The agents took the man into custody and transported him to the station for processing and a biometric background investigation, according to Rio Grande Valley Sector officials.
During processing, agents identified the illegal alien as Bienvenido Alberto Bonilla-Ponce, a Honduran national. A search of the Honduran man’s criminal history uncovered a conviction in Cameron County, Texas, for indecency with a child. This is the same county where the arrest took place on Christmas Day. The Texas court sentenced Bonilla to five years in state prison for his crime against the child, officials reported.
Bonilla now faces possible federal felony charges for aggravated re-entry after removal as a previously convicted sex offender. If convicted on the charge, the Honduran migrant could face up to 20 years in prison.
Most recently, Breitbart Texas reported the arrest of multiple deported child sex offenders apprehended by Border Patrol agents in Texas and Arizona.
The arrests included a Honduran criminal alien convicted in New York City for sexual abuse of a minor and a Mexican criminal alien convicted in a California court for lewd and lascivious acts with a child under the age of 14.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.
