Federal law enforcement arrested Democrat Washington, D.C. Councilmember Trayon White Sr. over the weekend in an upscale part of the city. The Washington Post reported that nearly a dozen FBI agents were spotted at a luxury apartment complex in Navy Yard — where rents for studio units start at more than $2,000 a month — carrying battering rams used to break down doors. There was no information available about the charges that he was arrested on, but a judge is expected to unseal the indictment at his arraignment in court on Monday. The two-term Democrat who represents Ward 8 in Southeast Washington was on track to win a third term, The Post reported. Tickets for “Am I Racist?” are on sale NOW! Buy here for a theater near you. His arrest reportedly came as a shock to those around him, including other city council members and even his own lawyer. DC Councilman @trayonwhite has been arrested by federal authorities according sources @nbcwashington pic.twitter.com/jDhAY3ys64 — Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) August 18, 2024 While no information is available about his charges, The Post noted that problems started to emerge during his primary race this summer when information emerged about campaign finance issues from his previous two campaigns. “Earlier this year, the office fined White $40,000, writing that the committees for his 2022 mayoral campaign and 2020 reelection campaign had, at various points, failed to provide requested documentation to correct discrepancies involving thousands of dollars of reported expenditures and contributions,” the report said. “That included $58,000 from his mayoral campaign that the campaign finance office said was not properly accounted for.” White garnered national attention in 2018 when he said in a social media post that Jewish bankers control the weather around the world so that they can gain control of cities. WATCH THE TRAILER FOR ‘AM I RACIST?’ — A MATT WALSH COMEDY ON DEI “Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man,” White said. “Y’all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation.” “And D.C. keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city,’” White continued. “And that’s a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful.” Democrat D.C. councilman Trayon White Sr. blames the Jews for the snow D.C. last week, claims it’s a conspiracy for them to take over cities. He says it’s “a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.” pic.twitter.com/IMwNGZhpmg — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 19, 2018

Flooding shut down subway stations and led to flight cancelations

‘Conservative principles are much better for us as a nation and for us as a people,’ one man told Fox News

Gosder Cherilus, a former NFL player and college football great at Boston College, was placed under arrest Saturday after he allegedly urinated on a passenger mid-flight, according to a report from Boston 25 News. A first-round pick in the 2008 NFL Draft, Cherilus was on a Delta Air Lines flight that was headed from Boston […]

A viral video shared on X claims conservative commentator Candace Owens is starring in purported “indoctrination videos” created by Hillsdale College. Candace Owens stars in @Hillsdale’s indoctrination videos Republicans are paying them to show in public schools ? https://t.co/JsGmQnrnbh — Rachel Bitecofer ?????? (@RachelBitecofer) August 15, 2024 Verdict: False The claim is false. The clip […]

Poland: Everyone Should 'Keep Quiet' About Nord Stream

MRC contributing writer Stephanie Hamill was a guest on The Evening Edit with host Elizabeth MacDonald on Fox Business on Friday to discuss the latest controversy swirling around Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign involving deceitful Google Ads.  As revealed by Axios last week, the Harris campaign has taken to paying for Google ads that, on first glance, look like legitimate news headlines from some of the nation's biggest news sources, including USA Today, the AP, Reuters, and CNN, among others. While not technically illegal, the move sparked criticism from those who pointed out the Democrat Party's supposed stance against "fake news," and caused concern even among left-wing media outlets that weren't happy about their names being used alongside pro-Harris headlines that they didn't actually publish. “The campaign isn’t breaking any laws or violating Google policy by rewriting headlines to make Harris and her policies sound more positive, but it doesn’t mean it’s ethical,” said Hamill. Especially considering the fact that many of the left say they’re concerned about 'misinformation' being spread in the 2024 election.   

Since Joe Biden exited the 2024 presidential race four weeks ago, the liberal networks have delivered an unprecedented boost of positive publicity to his successor in the race, Vice President Kamala Harris. Not only has Harris received 66% more airtime than former President Donald Trump, but the spin of Harris’s coverage has been more positive (84%) than any other major party nominee, even as Trump’s coverage has been nearly entirely hostile (89% negative). As always, our calculation of spin omits so-called “horse race” assessments (see methodology statement below), but a separate count shows those statements have also favored Harris by a whopping margin (94% positive, vs. just 43% positive for Trump). At the same time, the network coverage has virtually eliminated any discussion of the strident left-wing positions Harris took as Senator or during her 2020 presidential campaign. And while Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance and his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, have received nearly equal amounts of airtime, the networks have celebrated Walz (62% positive press) and punished Vance (92% negative). Details: ■ Nets Award Huge Airtime Advantage to Harris: This Media Research Center study looked at all 2024 presidential campaign coverage on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts from July 21, the day Biden exited the race, through August 17, including weekends. During those four weeks, the Big Three talked about the race in a total of 194 reports with a combined airtime of 437 minutes. As far back as 2015, Donald Trump has nearly always bested his competitors when it came to total airtime. During the 2020 general election, for example, the then-President received three times more coverage than challenger Joe Biden. Yet during the past four weeks, the networks have gifted the most airtime to new Democratic candidate Kamala Harris — 221 minutes of coverage on the evening newscasts, or about 66 percent more than Trump (133 minutes). The networks spent 31 minutes, 27 seconds talking about Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance over the full 28 day period we studied. Following his selection by Harris on August 6, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz received a nearly-identical 31 minutes, 59 seconds of airtime, but during a much shorter time period — just 12 newscasts. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was barely discussed — just four minutes, 44 seconds of coverage across the three networks. ■ Nets Award Harris with Historic Good Press: Campaigns might appreciate getting more airtime than their opponents, but it might be a poisoned gift if most of that coverage is hostile. That was certainly not the case with Harris’s national debut, however. Looking only at clearly evaluative comments from reporters, anchors and non-partisan sources such as voters and experts, we tallied 57 positive comments about Harris on the Big Three evening newscasts since July 21, vs. just 11 negative statements. That translates to an astonishing 84% positive spin score, an unprecedented level of good press. Many of the fawning comments came from voters raving about the new Democratic candidate. “We know that she is a powerhouse speaker,” one happy Gen Zer enthused on the July 23 NBC Nightly News. “I haven’t felt this kind of excitement since Obama,” another proclaimed on the August 10 CBS Weekend News. In 2020, we calculated that the networks supplied Joe Biden with 66% positive coverage during the general election, while the Democrats’ 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, actually received mostly (79%) negative coverage during that year’s campaign. Using similar methodology, Stephen Farnsworth and Robert Lichter in 2008 (scroll to page 14) found 68% positive press for Democratic nominee Barack Obama, “the highest...recorded for any nominee over the past six election cycles” by the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs. Given the networks’ idolatrous coverage of the past four weeks, it is conceivable Harris’s 2024 coverage could wind up even more positive than Obama’s was sixteen years ago. While the networks showered Harris with good press, their coverage of former President Trump was as hostile as ever. Over these four weeks, we tallied 86 negative evaluations about Trump vs. just 11 positive statements, for an 89% bad press score. The only candidate who fared worse than Trump was his running mate, J.D. Vance. We tallied 22 negative statements about the Ohio Senator, vs. just two positive comments, for a harshly negative 92% bad press score. As for Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, network viewers heard eight positive statements vs. five negative ones, for a 62% positive press score. Add it all up, and the networks have granted the combined Democratic ticket of Harris-Walz 82% positive press, while Trump-Vance have faced 90% negative coverage.   ■ Networks Skip Harris’s Extreme Liberal Record: Harris is almost certainly the most left-wing nominee of a major party in U.S. history. In 2019, she was named as the most liberal of all U.S. Senators, a grouping that included socialist Bernie Sanders. Yet Harris’s past support for many extreme left-wing ideas, such as the Green New Deal, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and imposing Medicare-for-All in place of private health insurance, were completely ignored during this wave of good press. Network reporters only twice explained Harris’s ideology to viewers. On July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang noted that Harris “has a liberal voting record that could be balanced with a more moderate VP.” Three days later, NBC’s Liz Kreutz identified Harris as a “self-described progressive prosecutor.” ABC’s correspondents and anchors never once thought to identify Harris as a liberal; the only mention of Harris’s ideology on that network came from occasional soundbites from Trump and other Republicans, describing the Vice President as a “radical left lunatic” (Trump on the July 28 World News Tonight).   ■ Downplay/Ignore Damaging Democratic Controversies: The networks spent barely any time on controversies that might have marred Harris’s extraordinary media honeymoon. Out of 221 minutes of total Harris coverage, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts spent a grand total of 25 seconds on the idea — always presented as a Republican charge — that the Vice President hadn’t been truthful about Joe Biden’s true condition prior to July 21. The complaint that Harris was being handed the nomination without receiving a single vote from an ordinary Democratic voter was barely noted, receiving a scant 1 minute, 59 seconds of airtime over four weeks. Harris’s failure to have any meaningful interactions with the press during this entire period — something that should have been a major issue for any news organization — received a paltry 57 seconds of coverage from these three broadcasts combined. In contrast, the networks spent 8 minutes, 20 seconds of coverage — all of it negative — thumping Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists when he questioned whether Harris used to promote herself as of Indian-American heritage instead of black. And J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies” running the country was promoted with 11 minutes, 32 seconds of coverage, accounting for more than a third of all of Vance’s coverage during these weeks. In fact, Vance’s “cat ladies” musings drew nearly twice as much network interest than all of Tim Walz’s dubious claims about his military service (just 6 minutes, 1 second). Walz’s mishandling of the 2020 riots following George Floyd’s death drew even less network interest: just 80 seconds of airtime. ■ Networks Are Portraying Harris as Having Massive Momentum: Our good press/bad press score doesn’t include statements about polls or prognostications, but the networks’ presidential coverage is chock full of such “horse race” assessments. Over the past four weeks, there’s been a tidal wave of positive statements about Harris, generating the impression of massive momentum in favor of the Democrats. Yet a closer look at the data shows the race hasn’t shifted nearly as much as the enthusiastic news coverage would suggest. From July 21 to August 17, evening news viewers heard 192 positive statements about Harris’s huge crowds, fundraising success, and momentum in the polls, vs. only 12 negative such assessments, for a 94% positive horse race score. There were far fewer such statements about former President Trump’s campaign standings: 21 positive vs. 28 negative, for a 43% positive/57% negative score. Yet a check of the average of polls published by RealClearPolitics shows Trump’s overall support has shifted by only a single percentage point, from 47.9% support on July 21 to 46.8% support as of August 17. Looking at the site’s state-by-state assessment, Trump continues to lead in states totaling 219 Electoral College votes, more than Harris. The only shift since July 21: moving Tim Walz’s Minnesota from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat.” Every other battleground state is still considered a toss-up that either side could win, exactly as they stood four weeks ago. The media’s wildly positive “horse race” coverage of the Harris campaign could create the impression that the Vice President is completely dominating the presidential race. But a calm look at the facts shows that, at least up to this point, the overall state of the race has changed fairly little since the Democrats swapped one candidate for another. ++++ As the Democratic National Convention begins, the Big Three evening newscasts have delivered Kamala Harris the most positive start to a general election campaign of any presidential nominee in recent memory. Not only is she getting the most coverage, she’s also getting by far the most positive press. The question is whether the public will be swayed by this extraordinarily lopsided coverage, or will they see this as just more evidence of a partisan news media taking sides. ++++ METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included. As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.

Parents and screen time Parenthood is brutal — it has always been brutal. But in an era of unstoppable tech growth, raising children becomes more difficult by the day. If you have kids or grandkids under the age of 13, you know the paradox of screens. The chaos of parenthood is relentless, and there’s a special brand for those of us with little kids. Exhaustion of every sort. Peace is hard to come by for parents and many grandparents, especially those of us with little ones. I have toddlers. Screen time is one of the constant subjects of examination between my wife and me. We're always assessing our screen time, our personal relationships with our phones, and the behavior we model for our kids. Handing your kid a phone or tablet is a quick way to buy a moment of silence. We are desperate for the chance to think, to breathe, and sit still. But this is no ordinary quiet. Screen time offers immediate relief in exchange for destruction that comes later. Parents make this deal constantly regarding screen time. Handing your kid a phone or tablet is the quickest way to neutralize a chaotic environment. But this pause is deceptive. It doesn’t seem to remedy the situation, and it may even worsen the chaos. Then there’s the addict-like response kids exhibit immediately after being handed a phone, a slot-machine glaze. They grip it like a starving ape grips bananas, as a tool for survival. The Mayo Clinic warns that excessive screen time has been noted to lead to all sorts of health issues, including obesity, violent behavior, attention deficit, sleep disruptions, and erratic behavior. It can even lead to “sensory differences” in toddlers. There are plenty of detractors who frame the rejection of screen time as part of a moral panic, contending that it’s harmless or even beneficial. This is one of the bizarre confrontations that have arisen with any new technology over the course of human history: People feel that these recent advancements are causing an incredible amount of harm. The other group claims that “every generation panics about technology, but most of the time their anxiety is actually ignorance and fear." Reality lies in between the two: The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck. Big little feelings damircudic/Getty Images Fad parenting has always been a problem. And like fads in general, it risks being swept aside at a moment’s notice, leaving a generation of disenchanted parents in its wake. Each generation winds up with its own parenting philosophy. It’s corrective, a way to address the failures of the previous system. It’s also expressive, allowing each parent to rule the kingdom creatively. It is full of predictions about what matters and what doesn’t, what should worry parents and what shouldn’t — with plenty of outrage and hysteria along the way. This philosophy is also a response to the folkways, constraints, disasters, luxuries, and technologies of that exact moment in history. The current era of parenting seems largely focused on gentleness. Gentle parenting is the coin of the realm. I’ll give you a rushed, cursory, and probably haphazard explanation. Gentle parenting, known formally as “attachment parenting,” is guided by empathy, the willingness to sit with a kid who, by most accounts, is being a real piece of work. Gentle parenting is focused on language that often sounds politically correct, like how it emphasizes bad behavior is “action,” not identity. It’s wrong, for instance, to say that a kid is mean. Say instead that the kid is acting mean. Parents are advised to “comment on the action, not the person.” Every new parent I know has taken a parenting course from “Big Little Feelings.” It may be the most obvious example of Millennial parenting philosophy available. I have to admit, the course has benefitted my parenting tremendously. The course has an entry on handling outbursts related to screen time, and as a true Millennial philosophy, the solution to screen time tantrums involves an acronym, PREP: P: Plan in advance. R: Reveal the plan. E: Explain the details. P: Put your toddler in charge. The method remains unproven, but my point here is that it serves as a perfect representation of the parental angst unique to this era of total networking, total communication, total information. The New Yorker captured this weird disharmony, where, in all of its planning, “gentle parenting represents a turn away from a still dominant progressive approach known as ‘authoritative parenting.’” It feels inherently feminine, yet it’s not. Because we have also seen an unprecedented shift in the father’s role and presence in family life. At its worst, gentle parenting resembles the performance of a cartoonish NPR host, whispering passive-aggressive slogans that don’t correspond to reality. At its best, it offers a key to peace in the household. It can be annoying and stilted. But it can also be calming.Screen activism If you have young daughters or granddaughters, you should read “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigail Shrier. She charts the spread of radical gender ideology as the cause of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” in which prepubescent girls who have never expressed any sort of gender confusion suddenly develop an identity centered on gender and body dysphoria. Transgender activists hate Shrier largely because she exposes the dark side of screen time, which political radicals use for recruitment. She argues that this fad is unnatural — it has never occurred at any other moment in recorded medical history. She makes a compelling case, and one of the phenomena she cites as proof is the influence that social media has on these girls. She refers to Jonathan Haidt’s observation that we’re living through a “mental health crisis,” the worst in decades, specifically affecting adolescent girls. Depression and anxiety rates are spiking, along with self-harm. And Shrier correlates it to the rise of the iPhone and social media. This has left kids today not just depressed and anxious but also socially underdeveloped. She argues that kids today feel like they should be able to live the carefree lives of their parents, but they don’t know how. So they seek the guidance of online personas who appear to have things figured out. This leads to peer contagion, the cultural spread of a mental pathology. Increasingly, we have seen how this process occurs throughout the education system. The “trans influencers” behind this fad are devoted to evangelization. Their biggest argument is that early intervention is necessary, the earlier the better. As Shrier puts it, “Trans influencers typically take a by-any-means necessary approach to procuring cross-sex hormones. Whatever you have to do, whatever you have to say — do it. Your life is on the line.” Shrier’s response to this tactic is one of her most compelling points: Intervention is not a pause button. No studies show that puberty blockers are safe or reversible. They stop sexual maturation and development of bone density from occurring. Studies have shown that from there, nearly 100% of kids put on puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones. This guarantees that the child will be infertile and have permanent sex dysfunction. In other words, early intervention almost guarantees infertility. We should hammer this in. It’s maybe the most shocking and unacknowledged part of the transgender craze. In other words, screen time has led to an unprecedented crisis of psychosis-driven mutilation. Shipwrecked Tassii/Getty Images Jonathan Haidt is quite possibly the most reasonable man in America. He is somehow unaffected by the political vertigo of our time, able to connect with every sort of person. He has approached the dangers of social media from many angles: as a tool for activism, as a corruptor of colleges, as a harm to teenage girls, even as a modern version of the story of the Tower of Babel. In an article for the Atlantic titled “After Babel: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Haidt uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor “for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit.” The story of Babel comprises one short chapter of the Bible, Genesis 11. Yet it’s a story everyone knows. He describes “people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.” Like the people in the story of Babel, America is in trouble: “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Social media platforms have damaged our trust, degraded our belief in institutions, and eradicated our shared stories. Haidt has been sounding the alarm about social media for years now, including in his most recent book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." Children born after 1995 are disproportionately anxious. This is largely the result of screen time. Screen time is alienating. It leads to isolation. Hence the alarming rates of depression and anxiety, both rooted in aloneness. Haidt argues that over the past 30 years, it has led to a rapid decline in “play-based childhood,” which has been replaced in the past decade by “phone-based childhood.” The Mayo Clinic confirms his assertions. He notes that the smartphone-driven "great rewiring of childhood" is causing an “epidemic of mental illness.” He suggests four ways to combat this: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones in schools, and prioritizing real-world play and independence. He describes “smartphones as ‘experience blockers' because once you give the phone to a child, it’s going to take up every moment that is not nailed down to something else,” adding that “it’s basically the loss of childhood in the real world.” He concludes with a similar refrain: “The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.” Like so much else as a parent, this process winds up being tough but redemptive.