Trump Says US to Designate Antifa a Terrorist Organization

President Donald Trump announced that the United States will designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.

“The United States of America will be designating Antifa as a Terrorist Organization,” the president wrote on Twitter Sunday morning, acting on an idea long called for by conservative lawmakers. The president said in 2019 that he was considering labeling Antifa a terrorist organization, but didn’t take any further action.

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Steve Bannon Says Two Alternative Futures for America: Lead the World in Freedom and Innovation or Succumb to Anarchy and Racial Division

On Fox News Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, guest Steve Bannon described two American alternatives by pointing out the juxtaposition of yesterday’s space launch at Cape Kennedy and the riots that took place across American cities. He called for immediate action to bring supply chains back to America and get the people working again.

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DOJ Backs Michigan Businesses Against Whitmer’s ‘Arbitrary and Irrational’ Restrictions

The Department of Justice filed a statement of interest Friday challenging Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s “arbitrary and irrational” restrictions on her state’s businesses.

The move came as part of Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to ensure that civil liberties are protected during the coronavirus pandemic, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in a press release. The statement of interest supports a lawsuit filed by seven Michigan businesses challenging Whitmer’s restrictions.

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Commentary: COVID-19 Has Plagued Religious Freedom

As the coronavirus crisis unfolds and the 2016 election and post-electoral scandals ooze into the open, God is affronted and false gods disintegrate. The discussion over the opening of churches is generally presented as a public health issue, coupled with a First Amendment freedom of religion argument. But, in many cases, it is an outright assault on the practice of religion generally.

Compared to other advanced Western democracies, the United States is a country that practices religion. But the media, academia, and conventional wisdom embedded in the contemporary ethos of America’s governing elites is, estimating very roughly, one-quarter religious communicants or sympathizers, one-quarter agnostic, one-quarter atheist, and one-quarter anti-theist. All of these groups, of course, are entitled to have and to express their opinions—but they are not entitled to impose their opinions on others. 

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SCOTUS Rejects Request from California Church to Block Worship Restrictions

The Supreme Court rejected a request from a church to block California’s restrictions on religious services.

South Bay United Pentecostal Church of Chula Vista, California, filed a petition over Memorial Day weekend saying that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus restrictions “arbitrarily discriminate against places of worship in violation of their right to the Free Exercise of Religion under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” according to CNN.

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Biden Campaign Cancels Fundraiser with Top Mueller Prosecutor

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has cancelled a fundraiser with Andrew Weissmann, one of the top prosecutors on the special counsel’s investigation of Trump associates, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Weissmann, an MSNBC analyst, was supposed to headline a virtual fundraiser for the Biden Victory Fund on June 2.

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EPA’s Andrew Wheeler Calls Out Senate Dems for ‘Politicizing’ Agency’s COVID Response

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler believes Democrats are politicizing the agency’s response to coronavirus and using flawed research to argue regulation rollbacks are disproportionately hurting black people amid a pandemic.

Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts used a politically-motivated research and a study based on 15-year-old data from Europe to suggest that the agency’s regulatory work is increasing the harm of coronavirus on minority groups, Wheeler said in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Ads for Children’s Book on 19th Amendment Written by Sen. Blackburn and Her Daughter Banned by Instagram

Instagram reportedly believes a children’s book written by U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and her daughter, about the history of the 19th Amendment, may “influence the outcome of an election,” so the tech giant has banned advertising for it.

The Federalist reported on the book’s ban.

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Newly Released Transcripts of Flynn/Kislyak Phone Calls Show Nothing Nefarious

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe on Friday sent declassified transcripts of former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s phone calls with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to Congress.

The calls, which took place during the presidential transition period from Dec. 22, 2016 through January of 2017, show that Flynn was concerned about an escalation of hostilities between the two countries after the United States expelled 35 Russian diplomats. The two also discussed Middle East policy at length and working together to defeat a common enemy: radical Islamists. There was nothing discussed in the phone calls, according to the summary, that would have given Obama-era government snoops reason to believe Flynn was treacherously “colluding” or “conspiring” with Russia.

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Two Killed During Protests in Oakland, Detroit Over Police Death of George Floyd

Two people, including a federal security contractor, were killed Friday night during protests over the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was killed in police custody earlier this week, according to police and the FBI.

The FBI is investigating the fatal shooting of a Federal Protective Services officer outside of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland on Friday, reported the San Francisco Gate.

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VIDEOS: Businesses Across Twin Cities Burned to the Ground, Residents Work to Clean Up

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota – More than 200 businesses across the Twin Cities have been vandalized, looted, or burned in response to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was allegedly murdered Monday night by a Minneapolis police officer.

After setting fire to the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct Thursday night, rioters made their way to the Fifth Precinct Friday, reducing a nearby Wells Fargo and U.S. Post Office to rubble.

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Jail Records Contradict Claims That Most Rioters Are from Out of State

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, and Gov. Tim Walz all have suggested that many of the rioters wreaking havoc on the Twin Cities are from out of state, but jail records seem to show otherwise.

“We’ve seen long-term, institutional businesses overridden. We’ve seen community institutions set on fire. And I want to be very, very clear, the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents. They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside of the region, to prey on everything that we have built over the last several decades. The dynamic has changed over the last several days,” Frey said during a joint Saturday press conference.

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Day-Long Protest Turns Violent in Detroit as Police Declare ‘Unlawful Assembly’

After a relatively peaceful day of protests Saturday, the Detroit Police Department declared an increasingly agitated and violent crowd of roughly 250 people an unlawful assembly when they refused to leave the downtown Detroit area on the second night of unrest following the  controversial death of George Floyd.

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A City in Ruins: Three Nights of Riots Leave South Minneapolis Looking Like War Zone

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota – Three consecutive nights of rioting in response to the alleged murder of an unarmed black man at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer have left stretches of the city in ruins, producing scenes most accurately described as a war zone.

Officer Derek Chauvin, the man filmed pressing his knee into the neck of a handcuffed George Floyd, was arrested Friday on charges of murder and manslaughter. He and three colleagues involved in the incident were fired from the Minneapolis Police Department Tuesday.

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More Than 500 Doctors Tell Trump Shutdown Is Creating ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ Nationwide

More than 500 U.S. physicians sent a letter to President Donald Trump describing the coronavirus shutdowns as a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non-COVID-19 patients nationwide.

The letter is signed by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, followed by eight pages of doctors who have signed on to the letter.

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Commentary: The ‘1619 Project’ Learns from Mussolini

Contrary to what many think, fascism is not based on the belief in absolute truth. Fascism is based on the belief that there is no truth; that is, on relativism, or nihilism. This position is actually built on a fatal contradiction: a relativist says there is no truth, but in so doing, he is asserting a truth which then becomes the basis for what he intends to impose on everybody else.

Everybody else has been so polite as to let the relativists go on instead of pointing out that they are proceeding from a premise that contradicts their own premise and therefore they don’t deserve to be listened to. But that’s where we are and where we’ve been for some time in the relativistic postmodern worldview.

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Commentary: Trump Executive Order Strikes at the Heart of Social Media’s Leftist Censorship

President Trump’s long-hoped-for Executive Order on social media censorship is a good first step in dismantling the Left’s dangerous influence over these 21st-century communications vehicles. (You can read the draft that was available online when this article was posted through this link to The National Pulse, edited by Raheem Kassam.)

We particularly agree with this part of the EO’s statement of principles, “In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.”

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Twitter Censors White House Account for Quoting Trump’s Flagged ‘THUGS’ Tweet

Twitter censored the White House’s official Twitter account after it shared and quoted a President Donald Trump tweet Friday that the company’s moderators hit for “glorifying violence.”

The account shared a tweet Trump composed early Friday morning in which he called people rioting and looting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, “THUGS” and suggested that he will send in the military, adding that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter hid Trump’s tweet under a banner noting that the post violates company rules against glorifying violence.

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Trump Says U.S. Ending Partnership with World Health Organization

President Donald Trump on Friday said the U.S. is terminating its partnership with the World Health Organization, saying it botched its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in China.

“We have detailed the reforms that it must make and engaged with them directly but they have refused to act,” Trump said. Because they have failed to make the requested and greatly needed reforms, we will be today terminating our relationship with the World Health Organization and redirecting those funds to other worldwide and deserving urgent global public health needs.”

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Former Officer Charged in Death of George Floyd

Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is in custody and has been charged with 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced Friday.

“We are in the process of continuing to review the evidence. There may be subsequent charges later,” Freeman said at a news conference.

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Medicare Chief Says Cuomo Is Wrong to Blame Trump Administration for His Controversial Nursing Home Order

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is wrong to say his state was following the Trump administration’s guidance when ordering nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients from hospitals, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator (CMS) Seema Verma said Wednesday.

“Under no circumstances should a hospital discharge a patient to a nursing home that’s not prepared to take care of those patients’ needs,” Verma said on Fox News Radio. “The federal guidelines are absolutely clear about this.”

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Michigan Launches MI Symptoms to Help Workers Track Symptoms, Prevent Coronavirus Outbreak

Michigan residents will now be able to track their daily symptoms in an online tool to help provide insight on where a new coronavirus outbreak may be next, as well as decide if they should return to work.

The Michigan departments of Health and Human Services and Labor and Economic Opportunity have partnered with the University of Michigan School of Public Health and College of Engineering to create the MI Symptoms Web Application.

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Michigan Adds Another 57,714 Unemployed Last Week

Michigan’s unemployment still hovers near 1.5 million claims, according to U.S. Department of Labor numbers released Thursday morning.

Michigan’s unemployment level is slightly under 23 percent, more than a 400 percent increase since the beginning of measures implemented by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to curtail the spread of COVID-19 in late March.

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Commentary: The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Lockdowns

The costs of the government responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic have been severe. New evidence suggests they could be even worse than we imagined.

An ABC affiliate in California reports that doctors at John Muir Medical Center tell them they have seen more deaths by suicide than COVID-19 during the quarantine.

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Commentary: Key Questions Former DAG Rod Rosenstein Should Be Asked at Senate Oversight Hearing

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called up former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to testify in the first of a series of hearings examining the Obama administration’s the Trump-Russia investigations and misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Graham announced the June 3 hearing in a press release on Wednesday.

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Executive Order Takes Aim at Leftist Tech Giants’ Censorship of Conservatives

After years of warning, President Donald Trump took action Thursday in the form of an Executive Order to remove a key protection companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google enjoy that shields the tech giants from lawsuits by individuals and other entities with claiming bias, censorship, and otherwise unfair treatment.

The Order, titled “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” comes two days after Twitter added a controversial “fact-check” of two of his tweets about fraud and absentee ballots, NPR reported.

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Mayor Frey Says George Floyd Would Be Alive ‘If He Were White,’ Calls Incident Murder

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he thinks George Floyd was murdered and claimed Floyd “would be alive today if he were white.”

Video from the tragic Monday night incident shows a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee into the neck of a handcuffed Floyd, who repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe. Floyd was pronounced dead shortly after he was taken into custody.

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Addresses Trump Fact-Check, Asks Media to ‘Leave Our Employees Out Of This’

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took sole responsibility Wednesday night after his company applied a fact-check on a tweet from President Donald Trump suggesting California’s mail-in ballot move is “fraudulent.”

Trump’s tweet Tuesday suggesting mail-in ballot votes are fraudulent could mislead people into believing they don’t have to register to get a ballot, Dorsey wrote on Twitter. He also asked people to lay off his employees.

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‘Wretched Orange Man’: Twitter Official Overseeing Misinformation Efforts Is Anti-Trump Partisan Who Donated to Planned Parenthood

The Twitter official overseeing the tech company’s efforts to combat misinformation is a left-wing partisan who in the past has derided President Donald Trump as a “wretched orange man” and said he donated to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site security, is the man in charge of the platform’s fight against election-related misinformation. Some of Roth’s past political comments from 2016 and 2017 began making the rounds in conservative circles Tuesday after Twitter fact-checked a Trump tweet predicting that universal mail-in voting would result in widespread fraud.

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AG Barr Appoints Federal Prosecutor to Review Obama Admin ‘Unmasking’ of Trump Associates

Attorney General William Barr appointed a federal prosecutor to review so-called “unmasking” requests that Obama administration officials submitted against Trump associates, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said on Fox News that Barr appointed John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, to conduct the review.

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Wisconsin to Mail Absentee Ballot Applications to 2.7 Million Voters

The Hill reports, the Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed to mail out 2.7 million absentee ballot applications to most voters in the state this fall ahead of November’s presidential election.

The vote came just a week after the six-person panel split 3-3 along partisan lines on whether to mail the forms to nearly all registered voters, even if they hadn’t requested one. The bipartisan commission on Wednesday unanimously passed the plan.

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Reports: Largest Concentrations of ‘at-Risk’ Coronavirus Patients Are in States with Best Health Infrastructures

Many individuals considered to be the most at-risk for coronavirus live in states that had the best health infrastructures in place before state restrictions began in March, according to two recent analyses.

Residents of West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia were found to be the most vulnerable, according to personal-finance website WalletHub’s analysis of States with the Most Vulnerable Populations to Coronavirus.

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Emily Hackett Releases Heartfelt ‘Handle’

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – I first interviewed Emily Hackett in October 2018 when she was featured in my Music Spotlight column. There has been a lot of shifts in the music world since then and we were able to talk about how that is affecting her/the industry.

As mentioned in my column, in 2018 Hackett released her EP By the Sun, and in 2019 she released its counterpart By the Moon which landed her as one of CMT Next Women of Country for 2019.

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Gov. Walz Activates National Guard in Response to Minneapolis Riots, Declares Emergency

Gov. Tim Walz announced Thursday afternoon that he has signed an executive order activating the Minnesota National Guard to help respond to the riots in Minneapolis.

Wednesday night’s riots were marked by widespread looting, vandalism, and arson, leaving portions of south Minneapolis in ruins. In one case, a construction site being developed for low-income housing was set ablaze early Thursday morning and collapsed into the street below it as rioters cheered.

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Justice Department Says George Floyd Investigation ‘Top Priority,’ Trump Briefed

The U.S. Department of Justice promised a “robust criminal investigation” into the death of George Floyd in a statement released Thursday.

A joint statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, and the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office said the investigation into the fatal Monday night incident is “a top priority.”

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Jason Lewis Calls for Curfew Amid Minneapolis Riots, Slams City Leaders for ‘Incompetence’

U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis called on Minneapolis leaders to institute a curfew in response to the ongoing riots that have left portions of the city in ruins.

“For many decades now, with only a rare exception or two, Minneapolis and St. Paul have been governed by liberal Democrats. The promise of a new day or the ‘good life’ has animated their political ascendancy but the reality is things have deteriorated to the breaking point we are now witnessing,” Lewis said in a statement.

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Hennepin County Commissioners Call for ‘Immediate Arrest’ of All Officers in George Floyd Case

Two members of the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners asked the county attorney Thursday to “immediately arrest and press charges against the officers involved in the murder of George Floyd.”

All four officers involved in the tragic Monday night incident have been fired from the Minneapolis Police Department, including Derek Chauvin, the officer who was recorded pressing his knee into the neck of a handcuffed Floyd.

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Target Announces Temporary Closure of 24 Stores in Response to Minneapolis Riots

Target Corporation announced Thursday that it will temporarily close 24 stores throughout the Metro area in the wake of mass looting and rioting in Minneapolis.

Wednesday night’s riots in response to the death of George Floyd left one Target store in south Minneapolis completely demolished.

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Whitmer Requests Extension to Continue Using National Guard for Coronavirus Response

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has submitted a letter to President Trump requesting the authority to continue using the Michigan National Guard to help in coronavirus response and recovery through the end of July.

Whitmer originally asked the National Guard to assist with the state’s coronavirus response on March 18. Trump approved her request on March 30.

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U.S. Unemployment Claims Top 40 Million Since March

More than 40 million Americans have filed unemployment claims since mid-March, when state governments across the U.S. began restrictions to slow the spread of COVID-19, including closing businesses deemed nonessential.

Last week, an additional 2.12 million workers filed claims, according to U.S. Department of Labor data released Thursday, the 10 consecutive week in which new jobless claims were in the millions. The 2.12 million claims from the week ending July 23 is down 323,000 from the 2.44 million workers who filed for benefits in the week ending May 16 and is the lowest number of new claims since the week ending March 15.

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New Email Shows Gretchen Whitmer’s Office Gave the ‘Green Light’ to Award Coronavirus Contract to Democratic Firms

Gretchen Whitmer

Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer distanced herself from a much-criticized decision to award a no-bid contract to two Democratic firms to handle the state’s coronavirus contact tracing.

But a senior adviser in the Michigan Department of the Health and Human Services said that the executive office of the governor [EOG] gave the contract a “green light,” a newly public email shows.

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Commentary: Let America Work Again

It was Monday morning on March 10, 2019, when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 lurched away from the gate, rolled to a sprint, and peeled its wheels off the runway for the last time. Aboard, 157 souls including eight Americans and one veteran on vacation doing missionary work, were flying.

Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 302 plunged back to earth, trailing white smoke across the sky until reaching its terminus near Bishoftu, Ethiopia. All aboard perished when the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft screamed into the ground at nearly 700 miles per hour, leaving a massive crater with wreckage driven up to 30 feet deep into the soil.

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Commentary: Liberal Group ‘Veterans Education Success’ Seeks to Re-Instate Obama-Era Education Policy Targeting Private Colleges

A new TV ad campaign seeks to overturn a key reform of the Trump administration. In the name of veterans, the campaign attempts to lure President Trump into breaking his word, endangering educational institutions in a difficult time.

In an ad by “Veterans Education Success,” we see servicemembers in uniform, overseas, and hugging their children, and shaking hands with President Trump. The images remind me of the strong support the President has had among active and retired military, who voted for him by 60-34 percent in 2016.

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Shocking Footage Shows Minneapolis Protesters Wreaking Havoc on Police Precinct, Destroying Squad Cars, Looting Target

Officers with the Minneapolis Police Department were reportedly attacked with rocks and paintballs Tuesday night as protesters rioted in response to the death of George Floyd.

Video from the tragic Monday night incident shows a Minneapolis police officer pressing his knee into the neck of a handcuffed Floyd, who repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe. Floyd was pronounced dead shortly after he was taken into custody.

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Senators Graham, Cornyn, Murkowski and Lankford Among Republicans Set to Block Trump’s Guest Worker Immigration Pause

Several Republican senators asked President Donald Trump to preserve key guest worker programs for foreign nationals, revealing a split in the conservative base on how to best protect U.S. workers and the economy.

Nine GOP senators signed onto a letter delivered to the president on Wednesday, asking that he keep in place non-immigrant temporary visa programs as a means to aid the recovery of the U.S. economy. Their request came in sharp contrast to immigration hardliners who have recently pressed Trump to scrap the programs amid record job losses.

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California DA Launches Investigation into Whether Tara Reade Lied While Testifying as Expert Witness

A California district attorney’s office is investigating whether 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s accuser Tara Reade lied while acting as an expert witness.

Reade testified for a number of years in domestic violence cases as an expert witness for the Monterey County District Attorney’s office, Politico reported. Media coverage of Reade’s academic credentials has thrown her years testifying as an expert under the spotlight, prompting concerns that Reade lied about her credentials in order to qualify as an expert.

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Twitter Dings Trump’s Tweets But Refuses to Fact Check Chinese Officials’ Virus Misinformation

Twitter has declined to take action against Chinese officials who spread coronavirus misinformation even after the company fact-checked President Donald Trump for suggesting California’s mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

A tweet from Chinese politician Lijian Zhao in March suggesting that the U.S. inserted coronavirus into China has not been removed or fact-checked. Twitter has previously said that Zhao’s tweets do not violate the company’s rules, but Twitter updated its policies on May 11, effectively making tweets from world leaders subject to misinformation labels.

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