Lynette Hardaway, better known as “Diamond” in the conservative influencer duo Diamond & Silk, has died.
“The World just lost a True Angel and Warrior Patriot for Freedom, Love, and Humanity! Please respect the privacy of Diamond’s family! Memorial Ceremony TBA,” read a tweet from the pair’s official Twitter account.
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The 15th vote was the charm for U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). But Wisconsin’s Republican House members had the new Speaker’s back from the first vote.
As McCarthy finally claimed enough votes for his narrow victory early Saturday morning (on the 15th ballot), U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) tweeted a photo of himself holding the last tally with the celebratory message, “McCarthy Wins!”
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Senior Editor at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson to talk about his recent article in which he calls conservatives to action to retake their woke local community institutions back.
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Tennessee Congressman Mark Green (R-TN-07) was elected on Monday to be the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Green defeated Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02) to secure the position.
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Buffalo Bills cornerback Damar Hamlin has been released from the hospital following his sudden collapse during last Monday’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals.
“Mr. Hamlin has been released and returned to Buffalo. I traveled with him to the airport this morning with our UC Health air care and mobile care crew, including teammates who were with us on the field when Mr. Hamlin collapsed,” confirmed professor of emergency medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and director of the Emergency Medicine MLP Program.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael in studio to discuss Professor Phillip Hamburger’s recent article at The Wall Street Journal referencing US Supreme Court and regulatory power.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed (R-TN-28) Tennessee State Senator Joey Hensley to the newsmaker line to talk about the big issues in Tennessee’s 2023 General Assembly agenda.
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Niche has released its annual school rankings for 2023. This year’s list shows that 7 of the top 10 public high schools in Tennessee are located in the mid-state region. Nashville’s Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School holds the top spot, closely followed by Williamson County’s Ravenwood and Rutherford County’s Central Magnet. It isn’t until the 7th slot that a high school outside middle Tennessee is recognized – Knox County’s Farragut High School.
The middle school rankings tell a similar story. Once again, 7 out of the top 10 schools are located in the state’s central region. The top public middle school, per Niche, is Rutherford County’s Central Magnet (a 6 – 12 school), followed by Merroll Hyde Magnet School (a k – 12 school) in Sumner County and Thompson Station Middle School in Williamson County. Coulter Grove Intermediate School is the highest-ranked middle school located outside of Middle Tennessee. The Maryville City School is ranked 5th.
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President Joe Biden on Sunday landed in the border town of El Paso, Texas, and his visit is being criticized as “too late” and a “propaganda event,” as record numbers of illegal migrants have entered the United States since he entered office.
“Biden’s promise to secure the border is too little, and two years late. Irreversible damage has been done,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted. “Over 313,000 illegal aliens flooded the border last month. 5.3M illegal aliens since Biden took office.”
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed recently that it saw tens of thousands of illegal immigrants for medical services in 2022, with the agency reporting a nine-figure budget to address the health needs of noncitizens.
The bureau said in its annual fiscal report last week that over the course of the fiscal year it “provided direct care – including medical and dental health services – to over 118,000 noncitizens housed at 19 [ICE Health Service Corps]-operated facilities throughout the United States.”
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On Wednesday, after a meeting between representatives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization (WHO), the WHO finally issued a statement condemning China for its suppression of information regarding the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Daily Caller, the WHO issued the statement after the meeting on Tuesday, declaring that it would “continue to closely monitor the situation in the People’s Republic of China,” while adding that there was a “critical need for and importance of additional analysis as well as sharing of sequence data.”
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More Americans polled in a recent Los Angeles Times/YouGov survey expressed opposition to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies as opposed to supporting them, including catch and release and not detaining and deporting millions of people who’ve illegally entered the U.S. since he’s been in office.
They also expressed support for local and state governments doing more when the federal government fails to do its job.
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The gridlock that paralyzed House Republicans over the past week in their quest to elect a new Speaker could be a foretaste of more to come, with party moderates and conservatives set to tangle in the months to come over raising the debt ceiling and reining in reckless government spending.
Although newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy ultimately prevailed in his bid for the office over a small but determined band of House Freedom Caucus members, his slim GOP majority in the House will be vulnerable if and when conservatives rebel again down the road, as some are predicting, in an effort to reassert debt reduction as a top priority for the party.
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by Laurel Duggan A community of men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate, or “incels,” are transitioning to the opposite sex to escape sexual rejection and improve their lives, according to numerous posts on Discord servers and other social media platforms reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. While many transgender advocates argue that one’s sense of gender is innate, unchangeable and largely unrelated to one’s biological sex, members of the online “transmaxxer” community encourage one another to transition for personal gain, often regardless of whether they have gender identity issues. By undergoing cross-sex hormones and identifying as female, transmaxxers argue men can improve their sex lives, access a new dating pool and escape the perceived hardships of being a man. For instance, one Reddit user who said he was 17 asked the transmaxxing community for advice about whether he should medically transition to female, citing perceived failure as a man. “I was seven years old when I started ‘praying’ to God to let me become a girl … I tried looksmaxxing when I realized that there is not much you could change just by working out and ‘getting a haircut bro.’ Got hit with this dilemma of wanting to be female,…
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The mother of an 8th grader has filed a federal lawsuit in the Northern District of Ohio Federal Court against the Willoughby-Eastlake School district claiming a violation of her daughter’s constitutional rights, failure to train school employees, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
On September 27th, a nurse’s aide allegedly strip-searched an unnamed middle schooler in search of a purported vape pen.
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U.S. Representative Andrew Clyde (R-GA-09) was one of fifteen hold-out Republicans to flip on Friday and vote in favor of Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20) to be Speaker of the House, paving the way for McCarthy’s late Friday win after a week of falling short by about 20 votes.
“My fight has never been about personalities — it has always been about restoring the People’s voice in the People’s House,” Clyde explained in a Friday social media statement. “I voted for Kevin McCarthy based on an agreement to a framework that creates significant historic institutional change. I look forward to helping implement these changes, which will hold the Speaker accountable to the People.”
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Dr. Daniel Pack, dean of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, has been recruited by Baylor University to serve as dean of its School of Engineering and Computer Science.
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Even though U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-55) would win the House Speaker’s race, it may have been overshadowed by an incident moments earlier on the U.S. House of Representatives floor involving U.S. Reps. Mike Rogers (R-AL-03) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL-01). Throughout the week, Gaetz had been the figurehead for the opposition to McCarthy’s bid, which kept McCarthy from reaching the required majority to earn the role.
Rogers had emerged as one of McCarthy’s most staunch allies in the ordeal by taking an aggressive tack against the 20-something holdouts led by Gaetz. At one point, Rogers called for stripping the holdouts of their committee assignments, which drew the ire of U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX-21).
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The St. Louis Park city government acknowledged in a recent newsletter that the term “manhole” could be offensive because it’s not “gender-neutral.”
“The city acknowledges that ‘manhole’ is not a gender-neutral term. It’s used in this publication as a commonly understood term and as the current industry standard to describe these structures,” says a footnote in a December newsletter on city infrastructure.
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Delegate Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach) has introduced a bill to create education savings accounts (ESAs) for parents that would receive a portion of state education funds; the money-follows-the-student bill is in line with long-sought Republican education goals.
“This is about where our children should go to school,” Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears said at a Thursday press conference.
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Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed conservative activist Christopher Rufo and five other people to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees with the goal of restructuring the university’s curriculum to a “classical liberal arts model.”
Rufo, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and filmmaker known for his activism against Critical Race Theory, was appointed on Friday along with Hillsdale College Professor Matthew Spalding, Claremont-McKenna College Professor Charles Kesler, former Emory University Professor Mark Bauerlein, Inspiration Academy founder Jason Speir and attorney Debra Jenks.
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A lawmaker from Montgomery County is circulating a request to colleagues to back repeal of a requirement that a married woman seeking an abortion in Pennsylvania notify her spouse.
In a preliminary description of the upcoming bill, state Representative Liz Hanbidge (D-Blue Bell) bemoaned last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide. Hanbidge insisted that Pennsylvania’s founding principles of freedom and individual sovereignty should empower people to kill unborn life without constraint.
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Arizona’s newly-independent U.S. senator and a senior Texas Republican plan to bring several of their colleagues to the southern border for a firsthand look at what she calls “Washington’s failure.”
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, announced Friday they’re hosting six other senators in El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona, to “see the many challenges at the Southwest Border, meet with the brave men and women tasked with securing the border, and hear from local law enforcement, community leaders, and non-profits” responsible for asylum seekers out of federal custody.
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The top Republican in the Wisconsin Senate is talking about inflation.
Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu on Wednesday used his speech to the newly sworn-in State Senate to talk about the pressure that inflation is exerting on Wisconsin residents.
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The University of Michigan (UM) spends more than $18 million annually to support its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff, according to an analysis of public salary records by UM emeritus professor Mark Perry.
UM pays a total of $18,120,242 to support more than 142 staff members who work to promote DEI initiatives on campus during the 2022-2023 school year, according to data analyzed by Perry. The total equals the amount it would take to cover the cost of in-state tuition for 1,075 students, he told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Georgia officials expect the state will receive more than $181 million after joining national settlements with four companies over allegations they contributed to the opioid crisis.
The Peach State will use the money from Allergan, CVS, Teva and Walgreens to help fund treatment, prevention, reduction and recovery initiatives.
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A $6 billion spending bill that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) signed on Friday expands a program assisting parents and guardians with supplemental education purchases.
The ACE Educational Savings Account program previously bestowed a $500 credit on families seeking to purchase enrichment materials or services to help their children get past the learning setbacks caused by the COVID-19 school shutdowns. The new legislation raises the credit to $1,000.
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“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House!
The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work.
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Chicago school officials this week revealed that the school system recorded nearly 500 sexual complaints over the last year, with investigators stressing their inability to respond to a majority of all complaints they receive.
The Chicago Board of Education Office of Inspector General said in its 2022 annual report that it received 470 “sexual allegation” complaints over the course of FY2022.
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Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody called on President Joe Biden on Friday to “confront Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador” and “demand action” to stop the flow of illicit fentanyl being brought into the U.S. from Mexico by the Sinaloa Cartel and its gang affiliates.
The presidents are scheduled to meet in Mexico City on Monday.
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Ahead of President Biden’s first trip to the southern border on Sunday in El Paso, Texas, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas again said the U.S. southern border is closed.
His comments came despite thousands of illegal border crossers pouring into the city, filling the airport, sidewalks, homeless shelters. Over the past few days, many were bused out of town and otherwise cleared out ahead of the president’s visit.
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Some lawmakers are active on TikTok even after concerns about the social media platform’s surveillance capabilities prompted Congress to ban it on some federal devices in December.
The bipartisan omnibus spending bill passed on Dec. 23 prohibits TikTok on executive branch mobile devices, with limited carveouts for national security, law enforcement and research purposes. However, Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan appear to be active on the platform, their accounts show, despite voting yes or “present” for the bill.
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A federal judge ruled Thursday in favor of a West Virginia law that requires athletes to compete in sports on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity.
Southern District of West Virginia Judge Joseph Goodwin ruled that the state’s H.B. 3293, commonly known as the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” is “constitutionally permissible” because its definitions of girl and woman on the basis of biological sex are “substantially related to the important government interest of providing equal athletic opportunities for females.” The ruling comes after a lawsuit, filed on behalf of 11-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender girl, argued that H.B. 3293 violated Pepper-Jackson’s rights under Title IX a federal law that prohibits discrimination of the basis of sex, and kept the student from joining the girl’s cross country team.
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At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this ongoing series of literature recommendations.
This week’s entries include fictional stories with timeless themes and insight into reality, in addition to being enjoyable tales in their own right.
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Fact-checkers and Big Tech lost another round with purported COVID-19 misinformation this week, when an American Heart Association journal published research suggesting the spike protein used in mRNA vaccines can harm some people.
The peer-reviewed study in Circulation reviewed 16 adolescents and young adults hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston Children’s with post-vaccination myocarditis from January 2021-February 2022. All had “markedly elevated levels of full-length spike protein” in their blood, “unbounded by antibodies.”
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After the tiered releases of the Twitter files, many suspicions have been thoroughly confirmed. Namely, social media monopolies like Facebook and Twitter worked hand-in-glove with the FBI, as well as other government agencies, to suppress accounts and censor stories they jointly deemed misinformation, disinformation, or otherwise harmful to the country during the 2020 election.
The most significant malfeasance arises from the coordinated campaign to suppress the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. The laptop exposed in great detail Hunter’s dissolute lifestyle, along with his role as the family “bag man” for various overseas financial interests.
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