Month: March 2021

Michigan state Rep. Matt Hall (R) told The Kyle Olson Show this week the legislature began passing bills intended to restore integrity to the election process.

Hall was chairman of the House Oversight Committee last session and held hearings that featured testimony from municipal workers, former President Donald Trump’s then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and counting observers who alleged officials did not follow laws and procedures.

Hall said there were concerns even before the election.

“The Michigan auditor general found that there were many people across our state who were over 120 years old, which is longer than the oldest living person and we found there’s over 300,000 people who were inactive voters who haven’t voted in over 20 years,” he said.

Hall said Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) knew those facts but still sent out “millions of unsolicited absentee ballot applications to this inactive voter list.” However, Hall insisted “we knew the list was inaccurate.”

He told The Kyle Olson Show House Bill 4127 will remove dead and inactive voters from the rolls, which would help to restore confidence in the election process. The House also passed a bill introduced by state Rep. Julie Calley (R) related to HB 4127.

Hall said the voters would not be automatically ineligible to vote, but rather would be required to provide evidence that they should remain registered.

He said he concluded after holding a series of hearings that “there’s a lot of things that we need to change in our election law in Michigan.”

Hall cited improved training for city and county clerks who conduct the voting processes and specifically signature verification.

He also said the legislature should prevent the secretary of state from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications, which a secretary had never sent before. Benson used coronavirus relief funds from the federal government to pay for the roughly $5 million expenditure.

While Republicans control the legislature, Hall said he has to remind constituents who are concerned about this issue that the state elected Democrats as governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, and in 2020, Democrats gained the majority on the state Supreme Court.

“What we’ve seen during the pandemic and also through the election is that these Democrats will just exceed their authority. I mean, they’ll just break laws and if you don’t have judges that will defend the laws, that’s how we get in this situation,” Hall told The Kyle Olson Show.

He floated the idea of organizing a ballot initiative if Whitmer rejects the proposals.

“We’re going to do everything we can to try to get this through and signed by the governor, but if we don’t, we’re going to have to look at other options,” Hall said.

Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on Saturdays–download full podcast episodes. Follow him on Parler.

ORLANDO, Florida — Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) told Breitbart News that the future of the Republican Party is with former President Donald Trump’s America First agenda, and that if the GOP embraces Trump’s vision the party will come back in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections.

Cotton said in the exclusive interview with Breitbart News at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), hosted by the American Conservative Union (ACU), that Trump “was the first Republican President to get immigration right in a very long time” and previewed the former president’s Sunday speech hammering President Joe Biden’s open borders agenda.

“This [immigration] is one of the issues President Trump and I first started talking about when he was a candidate in the summer of 2015: Immigration, and also the Iran nuclear deal,” Cotton told Breitbart News. “But he has helped reset the Republican Party’s view on this. But not entirely — you still have a lot of businesses out there that want cheap migrant labor. They want open borders. They want more guest workers to come in. But that’s not what our voters want. So what our voters want going forward — whether it’s president in 2024, the Senate and Congress in 2022, or just down to local offices this year, they want Republicans who will follow the America First principles that President Trump laid out. Because really, if you’re not going to put America first, where are you going to put America? Is it going to be last? Is it going to be 17th? Is it going to be third? Republicans need to pursue the America First agenda.”

Cotton also said that conservatives are looking for Republicans to stand up for the country and that he believes the future of the movement is bright. He said that despite the disappointment for GOP voters in November, the silver lining is that Republican gains in the House trimmed the Democrat majority to just five seats and the Senate is evenly split 50-50.

“We need all conservatives to be standing up for America more than ever,” Cotton said. “I know everyone’s disappointed about the election results but remember, we’re in a much better position coming out of the Trump presidency than we were coming out of either of the Bush presidencies. We had gains in the House. Nancy Pelosi has the smallest majority in 80 years. The Senate is evenly split. We picked up seats in state legislatures. We’ll probably win back the House just based on reapportionment and redistricting alone next year. So we have some difficult months ahead of us trying stop, you know, a wasteful $2 trillion spending bill, a massive amnesty and open borders bill that Joe Biden has introduced, higher taxes and attacks on our police and everything we hold dear, but we need conservatives engaged and in the fight and we have a great shot at winning back power next year.”

Cotton, in other parts of the interview, also lit up the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to influence American democracy and culture, and he criticized Biden’s amnesty plan saying that he believes Republicans have the votes to stop it in the Senate.

A Virginia school system has removed children’s books by famed author Dr. Seuss from its annual Read Across America program over charges that his books have “strong racial undertones.”

Dr. Seuss, whose real name is Theodor Geisel, is famed for classics including Horton Hears a Who, The Grinch, and Green Eggs and Ham, but the Loudon County school system now also says his work has “strong racial undertones,” the Washington Post reported.

According to a school spokesman, the district said they are looking toward books that are more “inclusive and diverse and reflective of our student community,” according to school Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde B. Byard.

Byard insisted that the district feels there are “strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss,” and added, “Given this research, and LCPS’ focus on equity and culturally responsive instruction, LCPS has provided guidance to schools in the past couple of years to not connect Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss’ birthday exclusively.”

The school district is not the first to hit the venerable children’s author with charges of racism.

As far back as 2017, a museum dedicated to Geisel’s work painted over a mural that featured Dr. Seuss-styled depictions of Asian characters replete with long braided queues and chopsticks. Activists at the time claimed that the cartoon figures were a “jarring racial stereotype.”

Flash forward to 2019 and academicians were formalizing an article in the peer-reviewed academic journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature in which Seuss’s work and his past was deemed “racist.”

Authored by Katie Ishizuka of The Conscious Kid Library and Ramón Stephens, a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego, the paper delved into Theodor Geisel’s early history, which included the publication of racially insensitive cartoons. The authors of the article also said that Geisel supported the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

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