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An economist skewered the leftist media for mindlessly propping up the Biden-Harris job market as the epitome of success now that it was revealed that the government overestimated job growth by nearly 1 million jobs. The Biden-Harris administration’s overestimation was a whopping 818,000 jobs, equal to about 30 percent of the reported jobs growth in the 12-month period ending March 2024. The revision obliterates much of the optimism about how legendary the Biden-Harris job market supposedly was. The New York Times blathered in a June 2024 analysis piece about Biden having a “historically strong job market.” The Times economic columnist Paul Krugman even bleated an absurd 2023 notion that Biden was “creating the best job market in a generation.” Forbes also celebrated the supposed “Record-Breaking Accomplishments On Jobs” under Biden in a June 7, 2024 item.  In an exclusive interview The Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni rebuked how “[t]he talking heads who parroted the business headlines and never bothered to look under the hood of these jobs reports fundamentally failed in their role as journalists.” As Antoni pointed out, many journalists just took the headline Biden numbers on jobs hook, line and sinker and fawned over them to the public without ever questioning their veracity. “There was no skepticism, no scrutiny, and no verification of the facts. They simply and obediently repeated the administration’s talking points,” Antoni continued. For example, over at Politico in February 2024, the leftist outlet used the so-called “strong job market” to haphazardly celebrate “Biden’s ‘holy grail’ economy.” The outlet beamed how “[t]he blowout job growth in January adds fuel to President Joe Biden’s pitch to voters that the economy is solidly recovering under his watch.” But in fact, as Antoni pointed out, “The jobs market is, at best, anemic.” There “are fewer native-born Americans working today than before the pandemic,” Antoni noted. Worse still is that the economy is “hemorrhaging full-time jobs and only adding part-time ones on net. More people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Earnings growth hasn’t kept up with inflation. Over 5 million Americans are still missing from the labor force compared to pre-pandemic,” Antoni stated. Antoni concluded by posing a blunt question to the talking heads in the media, “Where is the evidence of a robust labor market?” Antoni also told MRC that there’s been consistent issues in the BLS’s data that has been evident at least since the year 2022 that have gone unaddressed: [S]tatistical problems first became evident in the Spring of 2022 and the Labor Department has done nothing to address those issues. They owe Congress, and the American people, an explanation on what is wrong with their models and methodology, and why nothing has been done to fix it. If the problem was known within the Labor Department—and that’s likely given how many outside the department raised the issue—then it was effectively a sin of omission. If there was a “sin of omission” on the Biden-Harris administration’s part regarding its methodology for tallying job growth, the media have done virtually nothing to investigate it. On the question of whether a recession is on the horizon for the U.S. economy, Antoni stated that it is very likely that we have already entered one this month. “One difficulty in evaluating the onset of a downturn is the extent to which government debt is fueling GDP growth. You can put off a technical recession for a very long time if you’re willing to borrow enough money, but that doesn’t end well,” Antoni analyzed. The future — in a nutshell — is grim, Antoni summarized. In fact, “2025 is shaping up to be a very rough year, even if many of the Biden-Harris era policies are reversed,” he continued.   Antoni pointed to a litany of government actions that have shackled the American economy into an even more precarious set of economic circumstances than what citizens have already endured for the past few years: The Fed has blown asset bubbles across the economy, commercial real estate is imploding, inflation still isn’t dead, and the consumer is drowning in debt. So is the federal government for that matter. The next president—whoever he is—will have a heck of a fight on his hands trying to keep this economy afloat. We’re sitting on quite a few ticking time bombs. Will the narcissistic media that have spent much of Biden and Harris’s term in office casting them as some sort of economic savants take their massive “L” on the job market and change course? Don’t bet on it. Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818-460-7477), CBS News (212-975-3247) and NBC News (212- 664-6192) and demand they report honestly on the disastrous Biden economy.  

Fox Business Senior Correspondent Charlie Gasparino celebrated a brutal year for corporate racial discrimination after Jack Daniel’s parent company abandoned DEI initiatives.  Gasparino responded to a string of DEI defeats by pointing out that these leftist initiatives pose legal liabilities for companies on the Aug. 24 edition of FOX and Friends Saturday. Specifically, Gasparino told Fox News co-host Pete Hegseth that DEI is “a loser from a consumer standpoint” and could be a loser in courts “because the Supreme Court has ruled you cannot discriminate blatantly, and DEI is blatant discrimination.”  In an Aug. 21 email, Jack Daniels's parent company Brown-Furman announced it would scrap its DEI initiatives and cease providing information to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The HRC is a radical LGBTQ+ pressure group that compiles the Corporate Equality Index (CEI), judging the extent to which major corporations capitulate to their radical demands.  During the interview, Gasparino discussed how corporate DEI rose rapidly in the summer of 2020 but argued that the Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard marked a key turning point for corporate DEI.  “[C]ompanies went sort of nuts on DEI following the George Floyd killing. It was very rigid. It went from the very top, the board members all the way down to suppliers,” he said. “After that, there’s been sort of a consumer and public backlash against it because it’s patently unfair. And the minute the Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action is when you saw companies starting to unwind this stuff, particularly as it applies to employment.” The author of Go Woke, Go Broke went on to add that corporations not only had to fear the legal consequences of woke racial discrimination but also said that consumer backlash had played a huge role in ending corporate DEI or changing behavior at many companies.  Gasparino credited some companies for learning from this debacle and reining in unaccountable DEI departments, scrubbing radical language from their websites and recognizing that discrimination is “definitely” illegal. Companies have also increasingly rejected the radical demands of DEI proponents such as the HRC. The HRC’s leftist demands include providing “pharmacy benefits for hormone therapy, medical visits and lab procedures related to hormone therapy, surgical procedures, and short-term leave for surgical procedures,” according to the HRC website. The HRC also requests that the companies they rate “fully affirm healthcare coverage for medically necessary transition-related care.” Major companies like Tractor Supply and Harley-Davidson have also recently abandoned DEI initiatives and agreed to cease providing data to the HRC. Both companies promised to ensure that employee groups were focused on normal business goals. Tractor Supply promised to stop sponsoring pride festivals, “eliminate DEI roles” and “retire our current DEI goals.” John Deere, meanwhile, has made similar changes, pledging to audit “all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages.” The company also promised that it “will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.”  In response to these defeats, the HRC boasted that “this year’s CEI engaged over 1,300 businesses,” while attacking podcast host Robby Starbuck’s successful efforts at helping end the anti-American practices of these companies. Conservatives are under attack! Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report on the dangers of leftist DEI ideology infecting corporate America.

An old Jewish joke tells of a Romanian peasant trying to protect himself from a nocturnal visit by a vampire. Following the traditional method, the peasant holds up a cross as the grim visitor flies toward him. The vampire looks at the frightened peasant and utters the Yiddish phrase “vet gunichts helfen,” meaning “nothing will help.” The vampire, being Jewish, obviously didn’t respond to the Christian symbol.This joke came to mind as I read the well-intentioned commentary by Jesse Arm, a Manhattan Institute employee, about how the Republican Party can drive the left backward by repackaging the cultural war. If we can succeed in presenting “today’s cultural conservatism” in an appealing way, then we can show that it’s not JD Vance but Tampon Tim Walz who is the “weird one.”Twenty years ago, neither of our two national parties would be celebrating gay marriage nor participating in the festivities of Pride month. Now both do.Arm wants us to know that Donald Trump “has scrapped any condemnation of gay marriage.” Moreover, the platform on which Trump is running “has altered pro-life language to focus opposition on late-term abortion.” Trump has also “removed calls for a federal ban (which Mr. Trump says he opposes) and lends support to ‘policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatment).’”Most importantly, Arm contends, Trump still “embraces confrontational policies on cultural issues where the party’s position is reflective of public sentiment.” His platform “excoriates ‘Leftwing propaganda’ on gender, sexuality, and race; promises to ‘defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination,’ and harshly condemns illegal immigration and violent crime.”Arm’s commentary ignores the continued momentum of the hegemonic woke left, which seems to be increasingly radicalizing Western societies, particularly women. Twenty years ago, neither of our two national parties would be celebrating gay marriage nor participating in the festivities of Pride month. Now both do, quite ostentatiously, lest the media expose some politician for not being ecstatic enough about our obligatory nonstop worship of LGBTQ.Republicans’ attempt to tiptoe around the abortion issue is an even more telling example of woke left ascendancy. Most Western countries have far more restrictive abortion laws than many of our states, yet here the Republican Party must alter its attempt to restrict abortion to all but the last three months. Many leftist European governments routinely limit abortion to the first 15 weeks of gestation. But any attempt in the United States, however minimal, to restrict feticide will bring out the usual feminist crew shrieking about how the patriarchy will turn them into the degraded victims of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”The non-left and other dissenters from the woke state religion will not likely win a cultural war until the other side (yes, I am being provocative) is utterly discredited. The alternative will be more phased withdrawals of the kind that the GOP is now engaged in.Arm isn’t praising the key to victory but rather another fallback position in a series of tactical withdrawals. I’m not sure how the losers can become the victors, but until that happens, they — and the GOP, the party where the cultural right is now lodged out of necessity — will remain in a weak position outside of red strongholds.Least of all will the “sisterhood,” a.k.a. the community of college-educated suburban women, be turned around politically because the GOP will smile benignly on their ever-expanding “reproductive rights.” That’s because this demographic is striking back more at men than at the few remaining restrictions on their right to kill their fetuses, which in many places includes fully formed but not yet extracted babies. These “liberated women” view themselves, despite their unprecedented human comfort, as the victims of male domination, and no matter what countervailing evidence one produces, it may be impossible to change that perception. In any case, victimhood unites these women with other bogus victims and allows their “voices to be heard.”Interestingly enough, these perpetually hyped-up warriors don’t protest very loudly when politicians like Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz claim the right to take away their children and mutilate their sexual parts in the name of gender fluidity. Nor did they complain very much when feminist governors locked them up for months in their houses in a largely fake war against COVID. But all that may be small beer compared to the joy of fighting the “patriarchy.”Pretending that we’ve won “the culture war” while our armies are in retreat is not a convincing strategy. It would be more helpful to admit that we’ve been pushed back repeatedly and that new strategies are necessary if we are to stop the woke hegemon from advancing further. Jesse Arm is celebrating an imaginary end to our retreat and nothing more. Whether a comeback is even possible, given the vast and varied difficulties we face — starting with what Trump rightly calls the “fake media” — remains an open question. For now, I’m not betting on our side.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee Monday that he now regrets the major role his company played not only in helping the Biden-Harris administration censor Americans' protected speech, but in suppressing critical information ahead of the 2020 election. While unwilling to acknowledge its impact on recent American elections, Zuckerberg also indicated he will be terminating his "Zuck Bucks" scheme — ostensibly to alleviate some lawmakers' concerns about deep-pocketed partisans' election interference. Although it's unclear whether Zuckerberg's admissions will be of any real-world consequence — impacting, for instance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s censorship lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration — the committee nevertheless characterized his letter as a "big win for free speech." Suppressing dissenting voices Zuckerberg said in his damning letter addressed to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden-Harris administration, including the White House, "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree." The committee has obtained ample evidence in recent months and years detailing the extent of Facebook's work with the Biden-Harris administration to silence criticism of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, lockdown measures, and masking, along with other medically accurate information that undermined the Biden White House's preferred pandemic narrative, which it knew early on to be inaccurate. 'We own our decisions.' For instance, an April 2021 email circulated by a Facebook employee, ostensibly on behalf of Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg, noted that the Biden White House took issue with a "vaccine discouraging humorous meme," which it told the social media company to delete. Blaze News previously reported that the verboten meme in question used the "Pointing Rick Dalton" template, borrowing a still from the 2019 film "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character points out something on television. This meme, which the Biden White House wanted erased from the platform, was captioned, "10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear .... 'Did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine? You may be entitled ...'" and was apparently shared over 385,000 times. Besides memes and medical facts, Facebook also dutifully censored content about the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, which is now the most credible account. In his Monday letter, Zuckerberg admitted that despite knowing the "government pressure was wrong" and that his company could have told the Biden-Harris administration to pound sand, the company decided anyway to oblige the state, take content down, and censor users. "Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of pressure," said Zuckerberg. While Facebook was more than willing to comply with the Democratic administration's demands, Zuckerberg — possibly cognizant that he may soon be dealing with a Republican administration — indicated that the company is "ready to push back if something like this happens again." Election interference Zuckerberg also acknowledged in his letter Facebook's suppression of an accurate report in the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton ahead of the 2020 election. "The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election," wrote the Facebook CEO. "That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply." "It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," added Zuckerberg. Among the concerns raised in the New York Post's suppressed report was that a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter Biden for introducing him to Joe Biden about a year before Biden allegedly extorted the Eastern European country as vice president to get the prosecutor investigating Burisma fired. The report also hinted that Joe Biden, through his son and his own actions, may have been a compromised candidate and, at the very least, untruthful. 'Your enemies rigged the election and were rewarded with the White House.' While Facebook worked to suppress the report, elements of the intelligence community antipathetic to President Donald Trump — including active elements of the security state — swooped in to shield Biden in the final weeks before the election, releasing a public letter on Oct. 19, 2020, asserting that the Hunter Biden laptop story had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation" intended to hurt the Democrat's candidacy. Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director, later testified to Congress that he organized the letter to "help Vice President Biden" but, more specifically, to help "him to win the election." Zuckerberg assured Jordan in his letter that Facebook, having helped deliver to Biden a firm grasp on the 2020 election-time narrative and possibly the White House, has since changed its policies and process "to make sure this doesn't happen again," noting that content is no longer temporarily demoted while so-called fact-checkers decide whether it's fit for public consumption. The Facebook CEO also addressed the contributions he made during the last presidential election to "support electoral infrastructure." Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, dumped over $400 million into grants allegedly aimed at helping with election administration and voter accommodation. Critics have suggested that "Zuck Bucks" was alternatively a partisan scheme aimed at turning out more Democratic votes. "They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities," wrote Zuckerberg. "Still, despite the analyses I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a arole. So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle." "Zuck Bucks" may not be necessary in this election cycle, given that the federal government is actively working on fulfilling Biden's Executive Order 14019, which may prove far more effective at mobilizing Democratic voters. The response While the committee called the letter a "big win for free speech," Blaze News columnist Auron MacIntyre noted, "No, a win occurs when your enemies pay a price. Is someone going to jail? Is someone getting impeached? Is anyone even getting fined? No, you just got a confession that your enemies rigged the election and were rewarded with the White House." — (@) Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly suggested that the letter was too little, too late, writing, "Facebook may have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. Four years later, we get a letter saying 'sorry.'" "Mark Zuckerberg comes clean and finally admits what everyone already knows he and META did to influence the 2020 election," wrote Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) Elon Musk responded to the letter, noting, "Sounds like a First Amendment violation." Podcaster Patrick Bet-David speculated that there were three possible reasons Zuckerberg would have made these admissions: "1. He's being honorable[;] 2. He's done with the Dem party[; and/or] 3. He's getting ahead of a whistleblower." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!