A proposed statewide “ban on book bans” in public schools and libraries is just one of about 100 new provisions contained in a DFL-backed omnibus education policy bill that passed off the Senate floor this week.
SF3567 is sponsored by Democratic Sens. Steve Cwodzinski of Eden Prairie and Mary Kunesh of New Brighton. It passed on a 35-31 vote Tuesday, with Sen. Jim Abeler of Anoka casting the lone vote for Republicans.
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For all its gesticulations about “free speech,” the conservative mainstream often plays a supporting role in America’s censorship regime. It’s a two-step dance: The Right styles itself as the sworn defender of free speech and the mortal enemy of censorship while simultaneously downplaying or outright ignoring brazen censorship of speech that ventures a bit too far outside the Overton window. By claiming to defend all free speech in principle but only defending some in practice, the Right concedes, by omission, that certain ideas fall outside the bounds of free expression — and that it’s perfectly appropriate (or, at least, not particularly objectionable) to bring the full force of regime power to bear against any individual so unwise as to express them.
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Changes in congressional district boundary lines across several states do not appear to have damaged Republicans’ chances of maintaining a majority in the House of Representatives after 2024’s elections, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and New York have experienced redistricting processes ahead of the 2024 election. While experts had previously forecast adverse changes from redistricting in these states that could have cost GOP incumbents their seats, the processes have resulted, on balance, in races where likely losses of some GOP seats could be offset by the gains in other states, experts told the DCNF.
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The number of people laid off from American companies reached the highest point since January 2023, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.
American employers cut 90,309 employees in March, 7 percent higher than the 84,638 employees laid off in February and higher than the 82,307 positions cut in January, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. The layoffs are in contrast to seemingly strong job gains, which totaled 275,000 in February, while the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9 percent.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded nearly $14 billion Thursday to three organizations with deep ties to the Biden administration and the Democratic Party.
The EPA announced the winners of $20 billion of funding from the massive Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a program created by President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. Among the selected awardees are Climate United, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, three groups that are taking home almost $14 billion combined to establish financing operations for a wide variety of green technology and energy projects under the GGRF’s National Clean Investment Fund.
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A grave injustice may be about to take place in the Senate–and only public pressure can prevent it.
I write of the upcoming impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was impeached by the House on February 13 on two counts: that he failed to comply with the law and that he lied to Congress about the results of his failure to comply with the law.
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Two policies backed by Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom could place serious strain on California’s already fiscally unhealthy public schools.
California’s new minimum wage law, which took effect Monday, guarantees a wage of at least $20 an hour for workers at fast food chains with 60 or more locations across the country, The Associated Press reported. The new law, however, does not apply to food service workers in the state’s public schools, forcing them to compete in a more expensive labor market just as schools are preparing for an increase in demand for food workers due to the state’s new universal free lunch program.
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Documents reveal an organization backed by Obama White House alumni such as Valerie Jarrett and bankrolled by liberal dark money donors advocated using tax dollars to pay college students to get out the vote in the 2024 election, doing so before the Biden administration announced the same policy.
The Daily Signal obtained the documents through a public records request in which it sought documents from the Wisconsin Elections Commission related to President Joe Biden’s controversial executive order to promote voting.
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Growth in sales for electric vehicles (EV) slowed in the first quarter of the year as consumers remained wary of the product even though growth in sales of new vehicles remained strong, leading to a drop in EV market share, according to The Associated Press.
Sales for new vehicles grew 5 percent in the first three months of the year, but EV sales grew only 2.7 percent as more consumers chose traditional vehicles due to cost and product concerns, according to the AP. The average sales price declined 3.6 percent year-over-year to $44,186 in March as dealers looked to offload built-up inventory.
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The national average cost of a gallon of gas at the pump jumped by 20 cents over the past month, according to AAA.
Currently, Americans are paying about $3.55 per gallon on average, up from about $3.35 a month ago, according to AAA’s data. Goldman Sachs, one of the largest financial institutions in the U.S., has recently cautioned that prices could surge above $4 per gallon by May, according to Yahoo Finance.
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The National Council of Teachers of English, a professional development organization, hosted remote training to instruct K-12 teachers on how to teach the controversial book “Gender Queer” in their “classrooms, libraries, and communities.”
The NCTE, which boasts 25,000 members around the United States, hosted a panel including “Gender Queer” author Maia Kobabe and an “LGBTQIA+ Advisory Committee” to discuss how to incorporate the pornographic book into school curriculum.
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Former President Donald Trump’s campaign and affiliated groups announced on Wednesday they brought in over $65.6 million during the month of March.
The haul includes funds raised by the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and their affiliated entities, according to a press release. Trump’s fundraising apparatus, which has been lagging behind President Joe Biden’s, also announced topping $93.1 million in cash on hand going into April.
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Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas announced Monday that the state Department of Education was expanding its education savings program to include veteran and first responder families.
The Arkansas Education Freedom Account program, which was launched in 2023, helps fund families who wish to send their children to private schools or homeschool them and previously included “Homeless students, current or former foster care students, students with disabilities” and “first-time kindergarteners.” For the 2024-2025 school year, “veterans, military reserve members, first responders, law enforcement officers and students from D-rated schools will now be eligible, according to a press release.
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Democratic congressional candidate Don Samuels is in a potentially tight race against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, according to a new poll released by his campaign. Running in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, Samuels is challenging Rep. Omar for the district’s Democratic nomination.
In the new poll, when likely Democratic primary voters were initially asked about their preferences between Omar and Samuels, 49% said Omar, 30% said Samuels, and 21% said Undecided. However, the same poll found that the margin shifted to a tie between the two candidates (41% – 41%) after those same voters heard Samuels’ message of being “a progressive and pragmatic alternative to Rep. Omar without the divisive comments and history of taking unpopular votes.”
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A federal judge dismissed claims against Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis brought by attorneys representing migrants he flew to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 2022.
District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Friday that migrants could sue the charter flight company, Vertol Systems, that contracted with Florida to transport migrants in September 2022. But Burroughs dismissed other claims brought against DeSantis and state defendants, finding the court lacked jurisdiction over them in the case while leaving the possibility of future legal action open.
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Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill Tuesday barring biological men from competing in women’s sports just weeks after it passed the state Senate.
The bill was passed by the state Senate in March by a 20 to 11 vote and would require athletes to compete in sports categories in line with their biological sex. Evers had expressed displeasure with the legislation in the past and opted to veto the bill, arguing that it would only embolden “anti-LGBTQ harassment, bullying, and violence,” according to a press release.
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Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, President Joe Biden has made it a top priority to use any and all administrative actions to promote and pay for abortions with taxpayer money.
No single related action garnered more attention than Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s announcement that the Defense Department would use taxpayer funds to pay for abortion travel. Now, a new Pentagon report finds that the Biden administration’s abortion travel policy for service members and dependents was used only 12 times from June through December.
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One provision of the $1.2 trillion spending package passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden last month will see at least $380 million spent on securing the borders of several Middle Eastern countries, while the American border remains wide open.
According to Fox News, the appropriation of $380 million will be available until September 2025, and will fund “enhanced border security” measures in the countries of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, and Tunisia. Jordan will be receiving the most out of the five, at $150 million.
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A Florida sheriff on Monday boasted during a Fox News appearance about giving squatters a “one-way ride” to the local jail as concerns about squatting have grown nationwide.
Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed legislation to criminalize squatting on Wednesday after a high-profile incident in New York in which a woman who discovered squatters in her late mother’s luxury apartment was allegedly killed by them. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told “Fox and Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones that his deputies were already addressing the issue.
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The Biden administration’s well-funded push to build out a national network of electric vehicle (EV) chargers has so far resulted in only a handful of installations, according to The Washington Post.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021 allotted $7.5 billion to subsidize thousands of EV chargers to help the administration’s goal of having EVs constitute 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030, but only seven stations in total have been built in four states to date, according to the Post. The slow rollout of the EV charger funding is unfolding as the Biden administration has recently issued stringent emissions standards for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that will result in significant increases of EV sales for all three classes of vehicle.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized aggressive emissions standards Friday for heavy-duty vehicles that will effectively require huge increases in the numbers of electric or zero-emission buses and trucks sold over the next decade.
The agency is projecting that the heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards for model years 2027 to 2032 could result in zero-emission or electric vehicles (EVs) making up 25 percent of new long-haul trucks sold and 40 percent of all new medium-sized truck sales by 2032, according to The New York Times. The EPA’s final emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles complements the agency’s recent release of the final tailpipe emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that has been characterized as an “EV mandate.”
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Colleagues are coming to the defense of a Harvard University sociologist who was recently accused of plagiarism, arguing the claims are bogus and part of a larger attack on black female scholars in higher education.
Award-winning Harvard University Professor Christina Cross is under fire over allegations of plagiarism in a complaint first reported in mid-March by conservative education activist Christopher Rufo in City Journal.
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In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—who prefers to be known as AMLO for short—issued to the Biden administration blackmail demands that sounded more like existential threats.
AMLO warned the U.S. that the current influx of some 10 million illegal aliens through the southern border will most certainly continue—unless America agrees to his ultimatums.
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When you watch a political ad, often you’ll see a disclaimer of who the ad was paid for by, usually a political action committee, but what about the donors to the committee? Or the donor’s donors?
That’s the bridge that a San Francisco campaign finance law seeks to cross — now being challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court in No on E v. Chiu — and to prohibit an incredibly common practice in campaign finance, which are donations from anonymous sources.
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Most conservatives are aware Big Tech is an insidious force in American life. Tech giants censor free speech, promote wokeness, and fund far-left groups. A number of Republicans at the federal level want to curtail the massive power Big Tech wields in our country.
However, at the state level, many Republicans are lining up to serve the interests of the tech giants. Big Tech knows that there’s little appetite at the federal level to do its bidding. So corporations like Microsoft are now lobbying state legislators to enact the AI regulations they want. It’s a campaign few Americans know about, but it could dramatically impact their lives.
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A pair of Tennessee bills are intended to allow Tennessee to fight illegal immigration in the state.
Senate Bill 2158 will require agencies and law enforcement departments across the state to collect data on the financial effects of illegal immigration in the state. Senate Bill 757 would require local law enforcement to verify the citizenship of a detainee and report the individual to the Department of Safety and Homeland Security if found to be illegally in the country.
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President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses to publicly identify the dozens of U.S. international airports for which it has approved direct flights from abroad for certain inadmissible aliens. At least 386,000 migrants through February have been allowed to fly to interior U.S. airports as part of a legally dubious admissions program the administration launched in October 2022. The rationale for the program is to “reduce the number of individuals crossing unlawfully” over the southern border — by flying them over it directly into the interior and then releasing them on parole.
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President Joe Biden is quietly shifting strategy on the Israel-Hamas war amid a looming threat from activist groups and his voters ahead of the 2024 election.
For the first time since the war began on Oct. 7, the U.S. failed to veto a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for a six-week “immediate” ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, tied to the release of the hostages in Gaza. The Biden administration’s decision comes after pressure from his voting bloc, outcry from protestors and unrest in the White House.
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At its core, conservativism holds that America is at its best when families are strong, communities are safe, and the economy is booming. But in recent years, in certain parts of Tennessee, violent crime has risen even though the state has increased spending to keep more of its citizens incarcerated for longer. It’s only prudent to ask whether the current approach is working.
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Stupidity is what our schools are about. They do not teach young people about the glory of Melville, if they teach Melville at all, but about how Melville does or does not fit into some gridwork of identity politics, so that the work of art and intelligence itself, Moby-Dick, is left on the shore like a beached whale, dead and stinking, while onlookers in their stupidity hold their noses and pass by.
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Democratic President Joe Biden has made abortion a cornerstone of his campaign going into November, but its effect on his re-election chances is less than certain, according to political experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, said in June that they were going to be putting abortion “front and center” leading up to the election, and Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have since been active on the campaign trail at rallies across the country focusing on the issue. The president also invited Kate Cox, the woman at the center of a contentious abortion case in Texas, to his State of the Union address in March, but the jury is still out as to whether the president will reap the rewards of his efforts, according to political experts who spoke to the DCNF.
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Upcoming Princeton University lecturer Dr. Kim Tallbear lists running a “sexy performance laboratory” among her credentials.
Tallbear (pictured above), a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, is scheduled to give the talk “Why is sex a ‘thing’? Making relations against a Colonial world” on April 1 for Princeton’s annual Meredith Miller Memorial Lecture.
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The current cost of a median-priced home has now reached a rate of increase that is twice as high as the increase in the average American household income.
As the Daily Caller reports, the median monthly home payment for the month of February was $2,838, a 12% year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, the median household income is currently at $84,072, an increase of just 6% compared to last year. While the average income rate has roughly been on par with the cost of a new home for the last decade, the drastic change began in early 2022, when the average household income needed for a new home hit its current median of $113,520 a year.
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Over the course of a 12-day operation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested over 200 illegal aliens with a wide array of convictions for drug-related charges, including trafficking and possession.
As reported by Fox News, the arrests occurred from March 11th through March 22nd across 25 different cities, ranging from Seattle, Washington to Boston, Massachusetts. The drugs involved in the charges included cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine, among others. The arrested illegals came from 30 different foreign locations.
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Nearly 70% of registered voters believe that Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead, and more than 70% plan to celebrate Easter this year, a new poll finds.
A Scott Rasmussen National Survey poll, conducted March 20 and 21 among 1,000 registered voters, found that 73% of respondents will celebrate Easter this year. When asked whether they would celebrate the holiday primarily as a religious holiday or as a secular holiday, 56% of participants responded with religious, 16% said secular, and 27% said both secular and religious equally.
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Among world religions, only Christianity has a founder who professed to be the Messiah—the Son of God—who gave his life to save mankind.
The Easter weekend starts with Good Friday, the day God’s son Jesus was crucified to fulfill His plan to provide salvation from sin for those who believe in Christ. Easter Sunday is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, the third day from his crucifixion death, and the completion of God’s plan for all to know who Jesus was.
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Christians around the world will commemorate the most important event in our faith’s history this Sunday, but the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just important to those who believe a Nazarene who walked the earth 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. The secular world’s history also turns on this pivotal event, which inspired so much progress that we take for granted today.
Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.
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As a veteran homeschooler, I am well aware of what a marathon this lifestyle can be. There’s no break when you live and work in the same place.
It’s time to take a deep breath and assess the situation. Burnout is a normal part of homeschooling. Everyone experiences it at one time or another, and it’s often associated with feelings of being distracted, overworked, and overwhelmed.
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You may not get any chocolate bunnies this Easter, but you’re bound to stumble across an article or meme suggesting that the story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is just a reincarnation of some pagan myth. Whether it’s Ishtar, Osiris, or Attis, these claims are tantalizing but devoid of scholarly content–much like the sugar rush of the chocolate bunny, with its deficit of actual nourishment.
Claims like these are at least as old as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, published in 1890. However, they circulate routinely in new packaging. Unfortunately, the public tends to remain ignorant of the results of alternative scholarship. Sensationalism (like sex) sells. So does controversy. And when the sensation or the controversy revolves around beliefs that millions believe in whole-heartedly, sorting fact from fiction becomes increasingly difficult.
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Former President Barack Obama is reportedly becoming increasingly nervous over the likelihood of former President Donald Trump being re-elected in November, and has expressed his concerns to Joe Biden’s chief of staff on numerous occasions.
As reported by Fox News, Obama has made several calls to White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and other top aides on the Biden campaign, attempting to provide them with advice ahead of the election in just over 7 months. A senior aide for Obama said that the 44th president has “always” been concerned about the possibility of President Trump returning to power.
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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report Thursday arguing that a Michigan law requiring parental consent for abortions harms minors.
The law, which became effective in 1991, requires all Michigan residents under the age of 18 to obtain parental consent before getting an abortion or receive a waiver from a judge. The ACLU of Michigan chapter, alongside Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health (MOASH), however, argued that the law “undermines the safety, health, and dignity” of minors and that the process to waive parental consent is “traumatizing.”
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Four pieces of legislation that Democrats have introduced at the Minnesota Legislature in recent weeks aim to transfer ownership of property they say tribal nations inside Minnesota lost decades ago due to federal and state government policies.
But while proponents believe these land reclamation, or “land back,” bills are gaining momentum, many residents and local government officials in those areas are criticizing the legislation and opposing it at the Capitol.
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized aggressive emissions standards Friday for heavy-duty vehicles that will effectively require huge increases in the numbers of electric or zero-emission buses and trucks sold over the next decade.
The agency is projecting that the heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards for model years 2027 to 2032 could result in zero-emission or electric vehicles (EVs) making up 25% of new long-haul trucks sold and 40% of all new medium-sized truck sales by 2032, according to The New York Times. The EPA’s final emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles complements the agency’s recent release of the final tailpipe emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that has been characterized as an “EV mandate.”
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The Hill Former President Trump called Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign “great for MAGA” in a post early Wednesday. “RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far. He’s a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America.” “His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is even more ‘Liberal’ than him, if that’s possible. Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot,” he said, referring to his “Make America Great Again” slogan that has become a movement among conservatives. “Expect him, and her, to be indicted any day now, probably for Environmental Fraud!” READ THE FULL STORY
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Immigration into the U.S. has risen so rapidly that it beat out federal projections by decades, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Thursday.
The total number of immigrants in the U.S. rose to a record high of 51.4 million as of February 2024, representing 15.5 percent of the total population,according to CIS. The U.S. Census Bureau published projections in November which estimated that the share of foreign-born nationals in the U.S. would not reach 15.5 percent until at least 2039, making the projections “obsolete,” CIS authors Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler wrote.
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A brand new investigation has found that Google interfered in American elections at least 41 times over the last 16 years.
Published on March 18, the Media Research Center Special Report traced election interference efforts by the world’s most popular search engine all the way back to the 2008 election of former President Barack Obama.
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Republican Gov. Brad Little of Idaho signed a bill Wednesday banning the state from using public funding to cover sex-change procedures.
House Bill 668 was introduced in February by Republican Reps. Julianne Young and Bruce Skaug and bars the state from using Medicaid funds to pay for sex-change surgeries or cross-sex hormones, according to the text. The legislation passed the state House of Representatives 58 to 11 and the state Senate 26 to 8, with one abstaining, in March before Little signed the legislation into law, the state legislature website shows.
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Convicted cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried on Thursday received a prison sentence of 25 years.
A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy-related charges in November and the New York probation department’s sentence recommendation was 100 years in prison, according to a February court filing pleading for a lighter sentence. Bankman-Fried’s lawyer had asked for a 60-78 month sentence, citing the convicted fraudster’s philanthropic ventures and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
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I’ve discussed the “hero’s journey of Donald Trump” here in this column multiple times — and it turns out I couldn’t get away from it even if I wanted to. Every day we hear a drumbeat of evidence that the Left — the media-governmental-intelligence Deep State complex that has declared war on the entire world, with the free American people its primary enemy — has gone absolutely off the deep end.
Villains gonna villain, y’all. And these villains are villaining like the clock is running out on them.
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The Daily Wire Student protesters at Vanderbilt University who were staging a sit-in protest against Israel fell into a state of panic over logistical mishaps, and ended up urinating into plastic bottles and calling 911 because a woman said she’d go into toxic shock if she couldn’t change her tampon. The students rushed into Kirkland Hall, an administrative building on the Vanderbilt campus that was closed for construction, pushing past a Community Service Officer. Once inside the building, the demonstrators remained for about 21.5 hours, protesting the administration’s decision to halt a vote from the student government in favor of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. The protest was derailed however when the students realized they couldn’t leave the hall to handle basic bodily functions without getting arrested for their protest. At one point in the protest, demonstrators gathered in front of Kirkland Hall and clapped while chanting “Let them pee.” READ THE FULL STORY
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