The Internet is a treasure trove of conspiracy theories, but if you’re like me,  when you hear a new one, you’re saying, “It wouldn’t surprise me!” Biden disappeared with COVID for several days, walking up the airstairs like he might never take another step. We got a resignation letter with a photocopied signature and no […] The post The Joy of Conspiracies As They Go Mainstream appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

First looks are a tremendously exciting time for both the bride and the groom. What makes them even more exciting is when the bride throws an absolute curveball! Watch as this groom reacts when he excitedly turns around and sees his dog—not his bride. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Atlanta Wedding Videographer (@claudiagoodwinfilms) Surprise First Look: First Look With A Dog Not The Bride Quinn Meineke and his wife, Madeline, married on July 1. A new and popular trend in many weddings is a first-look photoshoot. This is where the bride and groom go against the old tradition of not seeing one another until they walk down the aisle. In a typical first-look shoot, the groom has his back to his bride as she walks up behind him. Then he is asked to turn around, and the big reveal is his beautiful bride standing behind him. Many couples are opting for this now as it offers many benefits. Some of those benefits are listed below. Allows for candid photos of just the two of you Helps to ease pre-wedding nerves Allows you more time with your guests later on However, for Meineke, this was no ordinary first look. When he turned around, you can see he was clearly looking for his bride. His eyes were high, on the level where he was expecting his bride’s face to be, but she wasn’t there. Instead, the couple’s adorable dog, Penny, was racing towards him. Happy Smiles and Tail Wags I don’t know who was more excited about the surprise, Meineke or Penny! The dachshund raced down the steps in her very own wedding gown. As soon as her dad crouched down to greet her, she was jumping onto him, showering him with love and kisses. The groom was surprised and overcome with joy. In the clip, you can hear him say, ” I can’t believe she’s here,” as he places a loving kiss atop her head. Originally, the couple had wanted Penny to be a part of the wedding, but that proved to be too difficult. However, that did not stop Madeline from finding the solution. She told People, “Quinn didn’t know this. I bought the dress for her and I decided to pivot and try to make it a surprise. I knew we were doing our first look outside, and I knew that wouldn’t be an issue to have her outside. So that’s kind of how it all came to be.” The bride and groom were not the only ones who loved this surprise. The internet loved it too! Their videographer, Claudia Goodwin of Claudia Goodwin Films, captured the entire moment and decided to post it on Instagram. With an adorable and fluffy surprise like that, it’s no surprise that the video has racked up over one million likes. I have a feeling this type of surprise first look is about to gain a lot of popularity. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post Groom Turns Around For First Look & Is Delightfully Shocked By What He Sees appeared first on InspireMore.

The magicians in the Democratic Party sure know a lot of tricks. First, they were able to create the illusion that Joe Biden hasn’t been in cognitive decline for years, even “fooling” the corporate press (if you believe their claims). Then — abracadabra! — they were able to magically replace Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate without her receiving a single presidential primary vote.As a big part of Biden’s administration, Harris owns his record. But don’t worry! With the help of their friends in the corporate left-wing media, the Democratic magicians are trying to make that disappear, too.No matter the smoke and mirrors, Joe Biden has made life worse for most Americans — and by extension, Kamala Harris has as well.In the short number of days since it was announced that Biden and many other Democrats were backing Harris, the race to memory-hole his awful record and give her the appearance of a good record, or at least a clean slate, has begun.A slew of articles have appeared in the past week trying to sell Biden’s so-called accomplishments. Slate published a story lauding Biden’s “true legacy” of “full employment,” arguing that “Biden’s labor market has more than compensated for rising household costs.” Tell that to Main Street America. A new CNN poll found that 39% of Americans “worry most or all of the time that their family’s income won’t be enough to meet expenses,” a number that is two percentage points higher than when the same poll was taken during the Great Recession.The Columbus Dispatch ran with an opinion piece alleging that “Biden accomplished more good in 4 years than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” Wow! While he certainly accomplished a ton, none of it was good.Biden oversaw historic inflation and a collapse in the personal savings rate. In his term, home prices become completely unaffordable for a huge number of Americans. He oversaw deficits-to-GDP more than double the historic average and interest payments on the national debt explode past $1 trillion.Credit downgrades? Don’t forget about that. The U.S. debt was downgraded for the second time ever under Biden, the first time being when he was Barack Obama’s vice president, and now stands near $35 trillion.And that’s just part of his economic record. There is also illegal immigration and the border crisis. Merrill Matthews reported in January 2024 that by that time, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States had doubled under Biden. Let’s not forget foreign policy or America’s weakened position on the global stage, especially in the wake of the Afghanistan bugout debacle.Kamala Harris and the Democrats need their media friends to magically make everyone forget the record, but the reality is that she owns it. She doesn’t get a free pass or a magic wand to make the abysmal record go away.Biden in the first weeks of his administration put Harris in charge of the immigration crisis. Now the same media that regularly identified Harris as “border czar” is trying to claim that never happened. Axios published a story headlined, “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign,” written by the same reporter who in 2021 wrote, “Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.”Another Axios article stated, “Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the ‘root causes’ that drive migration.” After online backlash, an editor’s note was hastily appended: “This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”The corporate press will continue to try to convince you otherwise, but Kamala Harris owns the Biden administration record.No matter the smoke and mirrors, Joe Biden has made life worse for most Americans — and by extension, Kamala Harris has as well. Whatever rabbit they try to pull out of their hat to cover that up doesn’t change reality, and Harris and the entire administration must be held accountable for that record.

After former President Trump took a bullet to the ear in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, conservative pundits lambasted the apparent incompetence of multiple female officers on his security team and called for the female head of the Secret Service to be fired. Right-wing pundit Matt Walsh contended that women should not be in the Secret Service at all. Dissident feminist writer Mary Harrington argued that while women might indeed theoretically belong in the Secret Service, there are nonetheless reasons why we might practically prefer men on its front lines. When Alexis de Tocqueville first visited America in the 1830s, he contended that what set the United States apart was the uncommon courage, firmness, reason, strength, and energy of its women. One of those reasons is purely physical: Trump is 6'3". To effectively protect him, one must be at least that tall. Very few women are. Plus, women are on average neither as fast nor as strong as men. So far, Harrington’s reality check should not be remotely controversial. But Harrington also goes beyond the reality of physical difference to contend that women are not just physically different from men in ways that make us, on average, less effective as bodily protectors, but also psychologically different in ways that make us, on average, less capable of reacting optimally and bravely to the kinds of threats that attend frontline combat roles like those of a former president’s security detail at a campaign rally. For many women and those who value equality between the sexes even without assuming indistinguishability between them, this is harder to swallow. And yet, it is undeniably true. So, the question of why it remains as true as it does bears asking. On the one hand, the same evolution that has made most men taller and stronger than most women has also made most men more aggressive, less agreeable, and less anxious than most women — in short, braver in a crisis. But, on the other hand, the popular American culture in which most women have been raised since the 1970s has so effectively de-emphasized the very virtue of bravery itself that we may in fact have exacerbated these differences between the sexes by producing an increasingly female elite that is afraid to acknowledge differences between men and women at all. In other words, it’s not that we have elevated female dimwits to shape today’s most influential media and education so much as it is that we have elevated cowardly dimwits, some of whom now happen to be female. We once had a culture in which facts like sexual dimorphism and the essential value to any society of traditionally masculine-coded bravery — with its willingness to engage violently when necessary — mattered to all thinking people. In this erstwhile culture, women were excluded from public life. We now have a society in which politically inconvenient facts (i.e., men’s superior strength) and less than utopian realities (i.e., the enduring value of strength in a fundamentally harsh world) are ignored by those that shape our culture. In this evasive society that embraces feelings over facts, women are welcomed into public life. What haven’t we yet tried? A society in which the embrace of facts and the embrace of female ambition coexist. Could such an America ever be, or are the mainstream embrace of truth and of female leadership mutually exclusive? I very much hope — and think — that the problem is not that we have been elevating women, but that we have been elevating the wrong women. In other words, we began elevating weak mindedness at the same time that we began elevating women. So, it now appears that Rosie the Riveter is too solipsistic and ideological to recognize that she began riveting precisely because she was not on the front lines in World War II and does not belong on them in any great numbers now. But America’s Rosies were not always so childish. When Alexis de Tocqueville first visited America in the 1830s, he contended that what set the United States apart was the uncommon courage, firmness, reason, strength and energy of its women. Womanhood grounded in these “masculine” virtues is foundational to the American story. And for women, embodiment of these virtues involves acknowledging the evolutionary reality of our own limitations rather than infantilizing oneself and endangering others by denying obvious truths in deference to fairy tales. The primary reality being denied in our mainstream culture today is that the unique physical and psychological strength that is the purview almost entirely of men remains indispensable to any functioning society. Paradoxically, women who acknowledge this are more than fit to lead. In fact, the renewed cultural leadership of such women is presently essential. Only strong women who accept reality in all its unsentimental cruelty (but cannot be so easily brushed aside with the accusations of “toxic masculinity” with which our mainstream elites tar strong men) can make American womanhood great for the modern era. And just as in the early republic: As goes American womanhood, so goes America.

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