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Lauren Boebert Raising Money Off State Of The Union Outburst

Lauren Boebert Raising Money Off State Of The Union Outburst

Instead of apologizing for interrupting President Joe Biden while he was speaking about the death of his son and other veterans during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is doubling down.

Boebert sent out a fundraising appeal to supporters, asking them to "donate today and help us ensure victory."

"When Biden talked about flag-draped coffins I couldn't help but call him out for causing the deaths of 13 brave members of our military who lost their lives because of his gross incompetence during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We expected bad, but the #SOTU is worse than we ever could've imagined," Boebert wrote in the fundraising email.

During Biden's first State of the Union address, the freshman member of Congress cried out, "You put them there! Thirteen of them!" while Biden was detailing the horrors of toxic burn pits, which have been known to expose military service members to toxic materials that can lead to cancer.

The outburst, a reference to 13 service members who were killed by a suicide bomber last year in Afghanistan, came just as Biden began to mention the death of his son. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015.

"They came home, many of the world's fittest and best-trained warriors in the world, never the same," Biden said. "Headaches. Numbness. Dizziness. A cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin.

"I know. One of those soldiers was my son, Maj. Beau Biden. I don't know for sure if the burn pit that he lived near, that his hooch was near, in Iraq and, earlier than that, in Kosovo is the cause of his brain cancer, or the diseases of so many of our troops. But I'm committed to find out everything we can."

Boebert's heckling earned condemnation, though GOP leaders have largely remained silent.

"The president was talking about his dead soldier son. You and @RepMTG were a national disgrace tonight," Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) tweeted. "But worse — because you are irrelevant — [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy owns all of this. He won't condemn you because he is a colossal coward."

"I agree with what Sen. Lindsey Graham said. Shut up. That's what he said to them. I think they should just shut up," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), said. The Republican from South Carolina was seen to mutter, "Shut up" in response to Boebert on Tuesday.

A handful of Republicans have gone further and publicly criticized Boebert for her behavior.

"I watched the #SOTU last night. There were issues I strongly agreed with. There were other issues I strongly disagree with. That's called independent thinking. ... But we can maybe all agree that Lauren Boebert is classless. An embarrassment to the House," tweeted former Virginia Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman.

Spokespeople for McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican Conference, did not respond to inquiries from the American Independent Foundation sent Wednesday.

For her part, Boebert continued to criticize Biden and trumpet her outburst, appearing on Fox News Wednesday and writing on Twitter Thursday morning: "13 brave and heroic members of our military died during Biden's botched Afghanistan withdrawal. They deserved to be recognized during the State of the Union speech so I made sure to speak up."

Biden pledged to improve health care for veterans during his address.

The White House released its plan Wednesday, promising to cover care for new rare respiratory cancers, expand access to care for veterans who suffered an environmental exposure, process more disability claims for exposures, and train Veterans Affairs providers to better treat them.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Joe Biden

How Biden’s Rescue Plan Saved Six Million Small Businesses In 2021

Nearly one year ago, President Joe Biden muscled his landmark pandemic stimulus legislation through a Senate with a razor-thin Democratic majority, despite unanimous Republican opposition. The American Rescue Plan Act revitalized the economy and delivered billions of dollars to struggling small businesses, a new report from the nonprofit Invest in America details.

"Today, many small businesses have been able to stay afloat due in part to the aid delivered through the ARP," Awesta Sarkash, government affairs director of the nonprofit Small Business Majority, said in a statement provided to the American Independent Foundation. "These targeted programs bolstered small businesses during difficult times and provided them with the funding they needed to persevere."

The American Rescue Plan, which became law in March 2021 and allocated $1.9 trillion in federal funding for stimulus checks, unemployment payments, child tax credits, local emergency funding, and more, came at a pivotal time for small businesses, advocates said.

In February of last year, three out of 10 small businesses reported they wouldn't be able to survive the next three months without immediate grant assistance, according to a survey from the Small Business Majority.

The American Rescue Plan also came with critical programs for small business owners like the Paycheck Protection Program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.

The law allocated an additional $280 billion to the PPP loan program, which sent federally guaranteed, no-fee, forgivable loans to keep small businesses afloat by paying expenses like employee benefits, payroll, mortgage or rent payments, utilities, and COVID-19 safety equipment.

While the program was first created to support small businesses under President Donald Trump as part of the 2020 COVID relief law, the CARES Act, a Washington Post analysis of Small Business Administration data later showed that more than half of the money went to big businesses. Last year, however, 96% of PPP loans went to businesses with 20 or less employees, the Invest in America report shows.

Additionally, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant sent out $13.4 billion to about 13,000 theaters and other venues last year to make up for their lost income due to closures during the pandemic.

And the Restaurant Revitalization Fund disbursed $28.6 billion to restaurants with the same goal in mind in 2021. By supporting more than 100,000 restaurants, the fund saved 900,000 workers their jobs, the National Restaurant Association estimated.

Of the restaurant grant recipients, 96% said it likely allowed them to stay in business during the pandemic, and 86% said it permitted them to keep or hire back employees who'd otherwise have been out of a job.

"[In the beginning of 2021], we were seeing a lot of small business owners lay off employees, and most small business owners will tell you that their employees are like family, so it was that much more dire," Sarkash told the American Independent Foundation.

When the pandemic first hit in March of 2020, businesses took a huge blow to their revenues, with lockdowns keeping shoppers at home. But the toll was especially pronounced for small businesses, who were not as prepared to shift their services online or find ways to continue serving customers.

"You could own an independently owned bookstore or hardware store or toy store and you had to close, but somebody could go to Walmart to buy groceries and while there, they could buy books, they could buy clothes, they could buy hardware," Kennedy Smith, a researcher with the advocacy organization Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told the American Independent Foundation.

Experts argue that keeping small businesses up and running is vital for the national economy. The Invest in America report links the ample funding provided to small businesses with a historic economic recovery, which some economists estimate happened at a rate eight times faster than after the Great Recession that ended in 2009. In 2021, the economy added 6.6 million jobs and 5.4 million new private businesses.

"During the shutdown, when people were not able to access their local businesses, I think that made them aware that their local businesses in their community had a huge role to play in keeping our economy afloat," Derek Peebles, executive director of the American Independent Business Council, said in a phone call.

Now, as they mark the first anniversary of the American Rescue Plan's passage, small business advocates want to see more action from Biden to support small businesses.

A few recommendations from Smith include comprehensive training programs for new business owners; affordable operating space; child care services for owners and employees; and minority-owned business development programs to close the racial entrepreneurship gap.

"[The American Rescue Plan] at least helps make small businesses whole from the damage they suffered during the pandemic, but it doesn't do a lot to change the overall environment for small business development," Smith said.

Smith and other small business advocates want continued investments in recognition of small businesses' central role in American civic life.

As Chanda Causer, co-executive director of the organization Main Street Alliance, told the American Independent Foundation: "This investment in sustaining those businesses, it's an investment in the next generation. It's an investment in education and civic life, our public systems, our firefighters — without those things our ecosystem starts to fall apart."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Nevada Candidate For Secretary Of State Vows To ‘Fix 2020 Like Trump Said'

Nevada Candidate For Secretary Of State Vows To ‘Fix 2020 Like Trump Said'

A Nevada candidate jockeying to run the state's elections is pledging to help overturn the 2020 election results, all while promoting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that George Soros and his "cabal" are to blame for election losses.

Jim Marchant is an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2020. He is now running for secretary of state in Nevada, where President Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 33,000 votes in 2020.

In a recent interview, Marchant promoted a baseless conspiracy theory claiming that Democrats -- including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and billionaire mega-donor George Soros -- hatched a scheme almost 20 years ago to elect progressive secretaries of state as part of an effort to undermine U.S. elections.

"In 2004, the Democrats — specifically George Soros, Harry Reid, and others of their ilk — hatched a plan, called the Secretaries of State project, and it was designed to get progressive liberal secretaries of states elected in all the key swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and they succeeded," Marchant told right-wing radio host Eddie Floyd in a January 19 interview.

"And the election of 2020 is a direct result of that plan," he added. "That's why George Soros, Harry Reid, and the cabal — they understood how important the secretary of state races were."

Soros is a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to America in 1956. Reid, who died in December, married his wife, Landra Gould, in 1959. While Reid himself was Mormon, he upheld his wife's family's Jewish faith while raising their five children together for more than 60 years.

Anti-Semites have long used the word "cabal" as a dog-whistle to refer to a small, secretive, powerful group of Jews who they claim manipulate global affairs from behind the scenes. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories often invoke Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, as proof of outsized Jewish influence.

Marchant, a former member of the Nevada state Assembly, is the sole Republican candidate for secretary of the Silver State. He's already racked up endorsements from Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Adam Laxalt, Nevada's former attorney general who is now running for Senate, endorsed Marchant last week.

If elected as Nevada's top elections official, Marchant said he would get rid of the state's voting machines entirely and would do away with early voting and mail-in voting while installing "our people" to oversee polling locations on Election Day.

Marchant ran for Congress in 2020 and lost his bid by more than 16,000 votes. Still, he attempted to challenge the results, claiming election fraud, despite lacking any material evidence. A judge threw out the case.

In a January 4 interview with former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon, Marchant called himself part of "a coalition of American First secretary of state candidates" who are working "behind the scenes to try to fix 2020 like President Trump said."

Marchant added that Trump loyalists like himself are running to be top elections officials in Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona — all of which will likely be crucial battleground states in the 2024 presidential election.

Kristina Karamo, a Republican running to be Michigan's next secretary of state with Trump's backing, has falsely claimed antifascist protesters were behind the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Biden won Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, flipping it from red to blue after Trump won the state in 2016.

Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) intends to primary Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump tried to intimidate with his call to "find 11,780" votes last January.

And Mark Finchem, an Arizona state lawmaker who stood near the Capitol as insurrectionists smashed windows on January 6, is running to be Arizona's next secretary of state.

These candidates, who all have ties to the fringe conspiracy theory movement QAnon, including Marchant, are running to promote the "Big Lie" — a baseless conspiracy theory that claims former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election, even though Biden won the race by seven million more votes.

Marchant isn't the only Nevada Republican looking to wield influence over the 2024 election. At the top of the state ticket, two gubernatorial candidates have staked their candidacies on the Big Lie too.

Former Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller said he told Trump, "the only way we can guarantee that, in 2024, we have a Republican president is we need a leader here in the state of Nevada that understands our election laws and [is] willing to change them."

And one of his opponents, Las Vegas Councilwoman Michele Fiore called the 2020 presidential election "perhaps the most poorly administered election in American history." In a viral ad, she used a gun holstered to her hip to shatter a beer bottle labeled “voter fraud."

Currently, pollsters view the Nevada gubernatorial race as a toss-up with Heller seen as a Republican front-runner in the primary.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Biden Economy Surpasses Goals Set By Trump

Biden Economy Surpasses Goals Set By Trump

Not since The Karate Kid was playing in movie theaters and Wendy's introduced its "Where’s The Beef?" ad campaign, has the U.S. economy seen such rapid growth.

America's real gross domestic product, a snapshot of a country’s economic output, increased by 6.9% in the last quarter of 2021, according to newly released figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The average GDP was 5.7% during President Joe Biden's first year in office — the fastest economic growth the country has seen since 1984.

"The GDP numbers for my first year show that we are finally building an American economy for the 21st Century, with the fastest economic growth in nearly four decades, along with the greatest year of job growth in American history," Biden said in a statement on Thursday. "And, for the first time in 20 years, our economy grew faster than China's."

This week's report confirmed that the country is seeing faster job growth under Biden than under the last three Republican presidents combined, according to Simon Rosenberg, founder of the liberal think tank NDN.

When he was in office, President Donald Trump often boasted about stimulating "the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America." In reality, Trump oversaw the worst drop in real GDP in American history, largely because of his administration's botched response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump once bragged about 3% growth, calling it "one of the great gifts to the middle-income people that they've ever gotten for Christmas."

"The economy now is at 3%," he told reporters in 2017. "Nobody thought it would be anywhere close. I think it could go to 4, 5, and maybe even 6%, ultimately."

Trump's prediction did ultimately come true — under a Biden presidency.

President Barack Obama also surpassed Trump's quarterly growth rates, reaching a quarterly rate of 5.2 percent in the middle of 2014.

The U.S. added more than six million jobs during Biden's first year in office. Trump, by contrast, presided over the loss of nearly 10 million jobs amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of the 42 million jobs created since 1989, almost all of them — a staggering 95 percent — have been added during Democratic presidencies, Rosenberg added.

Whether it's real GDP, employment, stock prices, or income, nearly every economic indicator reveals what Trump himself admitted to CNN's Wolf Blitzer in 2004: "The economy does better under the Democrats."

Behind 2021's robust economic recovery is Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which sent $1,400 relief checks to most Americans, expanded unemployment benefits, and invested in state and local governments, small businesses, and health care.

A December report from the Roosevelt Institute found that the American Rescue Plan spurred massive job growth while protecting the economy from the pandemic's worst effects.

Democrats in Congress passed the measure last March, over the opposition of every Republican in Congress. Since then, some of the same Republican lawmakers who voted against the American Rescue Plan have taken credit for the public projects it funded.

"It's amazing how Democrats are creating economic growth and didn't have to hand out trillions in tax cuts to big corporations and the wealthy!" Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) tweeted on Thursday. "Instead, we supported funding to open schools, get Americans vaccinated, and people back to work. Trickle-down economics is a myth."

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Massive December Job Growth Offers More Evidence Of 'Biden Boom'

Massive December Job Growth Offers More Evidence Of 'Biden Boom'

The economy added 807,000 private-sector jobs in December, more than double what economists had forecasted, providing more grist for claims that President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan is boosting economic recovery.

Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal predicted only modest gains of 375,000 jobs. But the ADP Employment Report, released Wednesday morning by the payroll company, signaled the economy's second-highest private jobs tally since May. Last month, private-sector jobs grew by 534,000.

The White House cheered on the news, pointing to the report as more evidence of a Biden economic boom."December was another month of strong private sector job growth," White House chief of staff Ronald Klain wrote on Twitter. "The American Rescue Plan has bolstered our economy, even in the face of COVID."

Robert J. Shapiro, a columnist for the Washington Monthly who worked as an economics adviser for both the Obama and Clinton administrations, wrote in December that few have noted the "Biden boom," even as Biden has overseen the largest real GDP growth rate in the century. During the first three-quarters of 2021, real GDP increased at almost eight percent annually, compared to an average rate of 2.2 percent growth from 2000 to 2019.

A December report from the Roosevelt Institute found that Biden's signature legislative accomplishment, a $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill passed in March called the American Rescue Plan, spurred massive job growth while protecting the economy from the pandemic's worst ill effects.

"We're entering 2022 in a position of a unique economic strength: Six million new jobs — a record number for a new President — have been created since January last," Biden said Monday. "Unemployment is down to 4.2 percent, three years ahead of predictions. New small-business applications are up over 30 percent compared with before the pandemic. And the fastest growth in America in nearly 40 years."

But Republicans continue to hammer Biden on the economy.

"Joe Biden just claimed the U.S. is "entering 2022 in a position of unique economic strength" GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote on Twitter Monday. "The facts: Inflation is highest in 39 years, job growth has stalled, and the supply chain is in crisis."

Some economic experts beg to differ, however. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, cheered the falling unemployment rate in December, saying, "amid improving labor market conditions and very strong demand for workers, the economy has been making rapid progress toward maximum employment."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Trump Spews Anti-Semitic Tropes To Israeli Journalist

Trump Spews Anti-Semitic Tropes To Israeli Journalist

Former President Donald Trump is once again slamming American Jews over what he claims are their political beliefs, hitting on a number of antisemitic tropes to lament his lack of support within the Jewish community.

In the 2020 presidential election, which Trump maintains he won despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump received support from only about a third of Jewish voters, a historically Democratic-leaning bloc, according to the Associated Press' VoteCast polling.

In newly released audio from an interview conducted by Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist who writes for Axios, Trump says, "There's people in this country that are Jewish, no longer love Israel. I'll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country. It used to be that Israel had absolute power over Congress. And today I think it's the exact opposite. And I think Obama and Biden did that."

Dual loyalty" is an antisemitic trope used to paint Jews as an "other" more loyal to a foreign nation than their non-Jewish counterparts. Here, Trump inverts the trope, instead saying Jews are not loyal enough to Israel, calling their allegiances into question and insisting that the demographic group should act as a monolith.

By claiming "Israel had absolute power over Congress," Trump also insinuates that Jews control the government, casting them in the frequent stereotype as power-hungry puppet-masters who wield outsize influence over domestic and global affairs.

Trump himself slammed Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota in 2019 for what some called an antisemitic tweet she posted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," in referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group that advocates on behalf of Israel. Omar apologized, but Trump said that her apology was insufficient and that she "should be ashamed of herself."

In the interview with Ravid, Trump employed another antisemitic trope, this one about supposed Jewish control of the media: "The New York Times hates Israel. Hates them. And they're Jewish people that run the New York Times, I mean the Sulzberger family."

In bemoaning Jewish lack of support for Israel, Trump was referencing the shifting Overton window among Democrats on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surveys have shown that American Jews' and Democrats' attitudes toward Israel have changed in the months since a flare-up in May in violence between Israelis and Palestinians that began with an Israeli raid on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Jewish views on the topic vary widely: A Pew survey that ran in 2019 and 2020 found 45% of Jews consider caring about Israel "essential" to their religion and only 16% said it is "not important" to their Jewish identity.

But the shift in the Democratic Party could be seen in a dayslong funding battle in September of this year between moderates and progressives in the House over sending $1 billion to Israel to support its Iron Dome missile defense system.

Donald Trump Has A Nasty Past Of Anti-Semitism

This isn't the first time Trump has invoked antisemitic tropes about the Jewish American community.

Days after Trump's inauguration in 2017, the White House released a statement marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day that completely omitted any mention of Jews.

After neo-Nazis marched at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, chanting, "Jews will not replace us," Trump refused to immediately condemn the white supremacists, instead saying, "You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," only buckling to pressure following immense backlash over those comments.

During Trump's 2018 trip to Europe, his chief of staff John Kelly reportedly had to warn him not to praise Adolf Hitler. According to the book "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, Trump had reportedly insisted during that trip that Hitler "did a lot of good things," pointing to Germany's economic recovery in the 1930s.

Speaking with The Guardian in July, a Trump spokesperson claimed the anecdote about Trump's comments was "made-up fake news."

In 2019, while speaking at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, Trump peddled stereotypes about Jews, greed, and wealth. After commenting about how Jews "don't love Israel enough," he told the crowd, "A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all."

He added that they would never vote for someone like then-Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren over him.

"You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax," he said. "Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away! Some of you don't like me. Some of you I don't like at all, actually. And you're going to be my biggest supporters because you're going to be out of business in about 15 minutes if [Democrats win]."

Reprinted with permission from The American Independent

Republicans Use Waukesha Parade Tragedy To Push Anti-Semitic Politics

Republicans Use Waukesha Parade Tragedy To Push Anti-Semitic Politics

Conservatives have wasted no time in politicizing the recent Waukesha, Wisconsin, tragedy, in which a driver plowed his car into scores of people participating in a local holiday parade.

The most recent theory promoted by some Republicans is anti-Semitic in nature and suggests billionaire philanthropist George Soros is somehow responsible for what happened.

"The massacre in Waukesha is horrifying. It was also preventable," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) tweeted Monday. "Soros prosecutors unleash havoc and violence when they take power. It is their goal. When we take back Congress, Republicans will take on the Soros prosecutors and stand up for the victims of crime."

Conservative lawmakers have specifically tried to blame the liberal donor for giving funds to local district attorney campaigns, to back bail reform, citing the fact that the Waukesha driver behind Sunday's incident had posted bond just over a week earlier, after being charged with reckless endangerment and skipping bail in a separate domestic abuse case.

The man in question had a long history of run-ins with police and had allegedly been fleeing the scene of another suspected domestic dispute when he struck multiple parade participants, killing at least five. The Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office has since announced an inquiry into what it called the "inappropriately low" bail approved for the suspect earlier in November.

While Soros has poured money into such races across the country, it was not immediately clear whether he had given to John Chisholm, the Milwaukee County district attorney. A scan of finance reports from Chisholm's campaign committee, Citizens for Chisholm, did not immediately reveal any contributions from the philanthropist.

Republicans were quick to blame Soros regardless.

"He funds everything destructive to faith, families, and freedom. He hates America," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote. "George Soros should have his citizenship revoked and we should block his money from poisoning our great country forever more. It's simple. If you don't like our Constitution, we throw you out."

Invoking Soros' name in connection with conspiracy theories and global plots, as many on the right commonly do, follows a pattern of anti-Semitism that connotes Jewish control of society, according to experts. Soros is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Hungary in 1930, and made his fortune as a hedge fund manager.

"In far-right circles worldwide, Soros' philanthropy often is recast as fodder for outsized conspiracy theories, including claims that he masterminds specific global plots or manipulates particular events to further his goals," the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish advocacy organization, states on its site. "Many of those conspiracy theories employ longstanding anti-Semitic myths, particularly the notion that rich and powerful Jews work behind the scenes, plotting to control countries and manipulate global events."

"Soros prosecutors" has become a canard on the right in the culture war fight around policing and tough-on-crime policies. Conservatives, for example, recently targeted a Muslim prosecutor in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the lead-up to the state's gubernatorial election, alleging that her connection to Soros resulted in a school sexual assault cover-up.

The more recent right-wing claims, including one from Ohio-based Senate candidate J.D. Vance that "the Waukesha terrorist is just one of many criminals that Soros-backed prosecutors have released into our cities" and that his philanthropy has created "death and crime across America," are the latest in a trend of GOP fear-mongering surrounding the incident.

Hours after the Sunday night incident, Fox News hosted Nigel Farage, a former British politician and Brexit leader, who connected the parade tragedy to the southern border and domestic terrorism, despite the case having nothing to do with immigration.

The attempts to tie the Waukesha driver to Democrats appears to be part of a broader attempt by conservatives to use crime as a cudgel against the left, alleging that high crime rates are a result of liberal policies to slash police budgets or admit immigrants and refugees into the country.

Crime has increased nationwide, but that rise has not been limited to Democrat-controlled regions. Numbers have ballooned in some cities that boosted police funding as well.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

GOP Leadership Silent Over Gosar's Video Of AOC Murder

GOP Leadership Silent Over Gosar's Video Of AOC Murder

A day after Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) tweeted a graphic anime video showing him scaling rooftops to slaughter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and threaten President Joe Biden, the far-right congressman has faced no repercussions, despite calls for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to punish him and for social media channels to delete his accounts.

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John Kelly, center, with former President Trump.

Book: Kelly Had To Restrain Trump From Praising Hitler

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Former President Donald Trump praised Adolf Hitler to his former chief of staff in 2018, saying he "did a lot of good things," according to Frankly, We Did Win This Election, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender that is scheduled to be released next week.

The Guardianreports that, during a trip to Europe to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, according to Bender, Trump cited as an example of a "good thing" Germany's economic recovery in the 1930s. Bender writes, "Kelly pushed back again and argued that the German people would have been better off poor than subjected to the Nazi genocide" and notes that Kelly told Trump, "You cannot ever say anything supportive of Adolf Hitler. You just can't."

Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington told the Guardian, "This is totally false. President Trump never said this. It is made-up fake news, probably by a general who was incompetent and was fired."

This would not be the first time that Trump had made comments supportive or admiring of Nazis or others on the extreme far right, nor his first anti-semitic comments.

In 2017, just a week after Trump was inaugurated, the White House's statement marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day raised eyebrows due to its complete failure to mention Jews.

In August of that year, after neo-Nazis marched at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, "Jews will not replace us," Trump iniitially refused to condemn them, instead saying, "You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."

In 2019, during an appearance at the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida, Trump peddled stereotypes about Jews, greed, and wealth. After telling the crowd, "We have to get them to love Israel more, because we have people that are Jewish people that are great people — they don't love Israel enough," Trump said:

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You're not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You're not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let's take 100% of your wealth away! Some of you don't like me. Some of you I don't like at all, actually. And you're going to be my biggest supporters because you're going to be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it. So I don't have to spend a lot of time on that.

Just last month, he repeated the comment that American Jews "don't love Israel enough."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

QAnon follower at a Trump rally in 2019.

Poll: Nearly Half Of QAnon Followers Believe In Global Jewish Conspiracy


Reprinted with permission from American Independent

At the dawn of the 20th century, a booklet based on anti-Semitic lies about a shadowy plot by Jews to control the world that was originally published in Russia in 1905 and subsequently translated into other languages, began spreading throughout Europe and to other countries.

A century later, the ideas captured in "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" still have their adherents. A Morning Consult poll conducted April 27-29 and published on June 28 finds that nearly half of believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory also believe in the purported plot by Jews for world domination.

Experts say the overlap is not all that shocking.

"People with conspiratorial worldviews believe conspiracy theories. … To them, events and circumstances are often the outcomes of shadowy conspiracies," Joseph Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and the co-author of American Conspiracy Theories, told The American Independent Foundation. "So they're not just going to believe one conspiracy theory, they're going to believe a whole bunch."

Of Americans who believe in the Protocols, almost 80 percent believe in QAnon too, according to the poll.

QAnon centers on the belief that a group of celebrity Satan-worshipping pedophiles runs the world through a "deep state" government. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter began cracking down and banning QAnon accounts last year, while the FBI warned lawmakers earlier this month that QAnon conspiracy theorists may mount more acts of violence.

Vegas Tenold, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, told Business Insider last fall that "there are several tropes that really sort of smack of anti-Semitism" in QAnon. "You're going to find very few global conspiracy [theories] that don't touch on anti-Semitic tropes." Genocide studies scholar Gregory Stanton called QAnon a "recast version" of the Protocols, replacing a cabal of nefarious Jews with a new group of shadowy elites.

On January 6, QAnon believers and anti-Semites found a common stage to air their fringe beliefs. One of the most striking images to emerge from the riot by supporters of President Donald Trump at the Capitol was that of a man wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words "Camp Auschwitz," a reference to the Nazi concentration camp where almost a million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Trump gave cover to both groups to emerge from the fringes of mainstream thought and profess their views proudly, Magda Teter, professor of history at Fordham University and the author of Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Anti-Semitic Myth, told The American Independent Foundation.

"You have a gradual amplification of voices that had been, just a few years ago, fairly marginalized and deep web [and] hidden — you really had to dig in if you were interested in the far-right antisemitic fringe groups," Teter said. "This changed since really Trump became the political figure that he became in 2015, starting to run for president, giving voice and weight to some of those people and those voices."

According to a report published by the Anti-Defamation League in 2020, 2019 was the worst year for anti-Semitic attacks since it started tracking anti-Jewish hate 40 years ago. And many of those attacks are inspired by anti-Semitic ideas peddled by conspiracy theorists on the internet.

In 2018, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of QAnon's most prominent adherents, claimed that the Jewish Rothschild family was responsible for starting California's worst wildfire in history with a space laser.

While Democratic House members voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments after that and other remarks, her Republican colleagues stood by her.

Currently, 15 percent of Americans agree that government, media, and financial systems are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a global child sex trafficking ring, according to a May poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core.

"The beliefs and theories that were totally fringe and unacceptable now are espoused by members of Congress, to no really serious consequence," said Fordham's Teter.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.