A particularly idiotic aphorism touted by our mindless culture is this cliché: Wait until you have enough money to have kids.  This nugget serves as secular wisdom, courtesy of the noxious winds of the zeitgeist. It always frustrates me. When I hear it regurgitated by young couples, I calmly ask them questions like these:  How many kids did your grandparents have? How about your great-grandparents when they came to America dirt poor on packed ships headed to Ellis Island? When they acknowledge that those ancestors had a bunch of kids, I then ask this conversation stopper: How much money did they have? The guy and gal are usually taken aback. This isn’t what they’ve heard from the culture. Yes, they know that their ancestors had no money and raised large, intact families — and stayed married. They wouldn’t be alive today without those ancestors bestowing multiple gifts of life. Their grandparents gave life freely and lovingly. Money was not the object. Life was. Kids were. (READ MORE: Forget Cats and Dogs — There Aren’t Enough Kids) Conversations like these are how you reach young people distorted by the culture. You take the lid off and ask common-sense questions. Get them thinking. A few follow-up observations likewise leave them baffled. I’ll ask: How much money will be “enough” before having that kid? How much cash should be shoveled into this child’s materialistically ideal existence? What are you planning to buy for the kid? Any concerns about spoiling little Timmy or Suzie? People singularly focused on having “enough” money for kids will find that there’s never “enough.” At least not within their current value system. If they do mercifully set aside these financial constraints and go for it and have babies, they will soon find that kids really aren’t that expensive. Children can be raised cheaply and happily. The big financial hit usually doesn’t come until college, if college is the objective. Even then, parents will be shocked to find that the more money they have, the less financial aid they’ll get. Sometimes, having more money costs you more. The Greatest Gift You Can Give Your Child Is a Sibling Young parents will say in astonishment to my wife and I: “You have eight children? One kid has been hard enough for us!” My response is that, yes, one kid is harder. Two kids, however, are easier, because the one gets a playmate other than you. When we had only one child and I came home after a long day, I didn’t want to play Legos for several hours. When the second boy came along, he was all in. Little Paul now had little Mitch to join him at his level, both running around with boundless energy, enthralled by their new worlds in ways that I could not fake. Our first boy now had someone genuinely fascinated by his Hot Wheels. And then came a third for us, a girl. And she was likewise over-the-moon excited when our fourth, another girl, arrived. They played together.  The cycle continued. Each new arrival was a new brother or sister, with each sibling ecstatic about the next. Doubt me? Try this experiment: Ask a five-year-old if he wants another sibling. Go ahead. A kid doesn’t say no to that. I’ll never forget when my wife got the phone call from our adoption agency explaining that the mother of our previously adopted child had just given birth and was putting the child up for adoption. They preferred to find a family in which the infant had a birth sibling. That would be ours. Were we interested? This would be our eighth. (READ MORE: The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing?) I was driving the family van when that call came in. All eyes fixed on me as I expressed doubts about whether I could personally handle another baby. But the van of nine voices erupted into jubilant chants of “Yes! Yes! Yes! Do it! Do it! Do it!” I was shouted down and outvoted. The oldest girls assured their old man that he wouldn’t have to change diapers anymore.  That infant, Benedict, turns 10 next week. He’s my little buddy. He’s the baby of the family, adored by all. Children bring joy. To that end, last week someone sent me a post from the inane “Instagram.com/facts.” This “Facts” post was headlined, “People without children tend to be happier than parents.” The post was eviscerated in a snappy 11-point takedown by Dr. Jordan Peterson. It made me angry. I wanted to know which faceless 22-year-old twit was responsible for that drivel. Sure, some people without children are happy. That’s fine, totally good. But we should encourage parenting rather than discourage it. 1. Says who?2. Measured how?3.Over what time span?4. Compared to who and when?5. Happier or more hedonistic and immature?6. Who funded the "research"?7. Lies, damned lies and statistics 8. One phrase: "replication crisis"9. Meaning and happiness are not the same thing but… pic.twitter.com/fHHv7gKwxQ — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 10, 2024 And I’ll bet this: Twenty years from now, if this twit is married without kids, there’s a good chance he or she will not be happy, and perhaps miserably and unwittingly childless because of a lack of fertility after contracepting too long. That person may well be single right now, and 20 years henceforth might regretfully remain so after years of heartaches, breakups, STDs, and possibly aborted children. My sincere prayer is that the person gives up the self-centered pleasure-seeking, finds a caring spouse, that the two become one flesh together, and gives the gift of life. (READ MORE: Abortions Are on the Rise, Planned Parenthood Proudly Reports) I can assure her that she would find infinitely more fulfillment in a little boy with Legos or a little girl with dolls than in their dogs and hiking boots. Mother Teresa once said, “How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.” Personally, I don’t care about flowers (though I make sure my wife gets flowers every Mother’s Day), but I do care about children. We’re called to fill the world with them. You can never have enough — of them. To all fellow dads out there, Happy Father’s Day. The post You Can Never Have Enough Kids appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington sailed through the South Atlantic last week to conduct the first joint U.S. naval maneuvers with Argentina in more than 30 years. During much of that time, governing leftist peronistas gave bases to China, supported Venezuela’s communist regime, and allowed Iran to develop local terrorist networks as they drove the country to bankruptcy. Argentina’s new libertarian president — who was elected by a landslide in a country suffering 200 percent inflation — is changing course. His foreign minister, Diana Mondino, just signed an agreement for “High-Level Strategic Dialogue” with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to develop security and defense ties. “I want a free capitalist world, but it must be protected from those seeking to prey upon it,” President Javier Milei recently told the Free Press. The Biden administration has had to overlook Milei’s vitriolic attacks on socialist globalism, his disparagement of LGBTQ wokeism, and his open admiration for Donald Trump to seize the chance to roll back Chinese, Russian, and Iranian encroachments on the Western hemisphere, which have reached alarming levels and seem increasingly coordinated. “A realization by the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon that Washington could completely lose control of the hemisphere unless they took advantage of the opportunity to renew ties with Argentina allowed national security concerns to prevail,” says Fabián Calle, of the Argentine Council for International Relations who is an adviser to the new government. The State Department has been downgrading relations with right-wing leaders — such as El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who it threatened to sanction over his brutal but effective crackdown on the country’s Maras criminal gangs — while pandering to communist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba and courting iconic “center” leftists like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The result is that Nicolas Maduro has reneged on promises to permit competitive elections in Venezuela and his brand of criminal socialism is spreading to other countries; Lula is parroting Iranian propaganda, claiming that Israel murdered 12 million Palestinians in Gaza; and Cuba just announced this week that it’s welcoming a squadron of Russian warships including a nuclear submarine on a port visit to Havana. A series of top U.S. defense and intelligence officials have traveled to Argentina for high-level discussions. Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, who has been highly outspoken in denouncing China’s growing presence, has made two trips to arrange the delivery of security assistance for Argentina’s neglected armed forces. CIA Director Nicholas Burns has flown to Buenos Aires to meet with Milei and FBI director Christopher Wray arrived on board a giant Air Force C-17 Globemaster. This is progress. Chinese construction of a port in Tierra del Fuego to dominate the strategic waterways connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific has been stopped. Gen. Richardson repeatedly warned in congressional statements, that the facility would have “dual use” as a military base for China to hinder the only crossing point between the two oceans for aircraft carriers which are too large to cross the Panama Canal. Negotiations are currently underway to switch the Argentine port concession to the U.S. Milei has also gone ahead with the acquisition of 24 American F-16s to rebuild Argentina’s air force, orphaned since its defeat in Falklands War in the 1980s. The peronistas wanted to buy outdated Chinese J-7 fighters in what Florida congresswoman Maria Elviria Salazar denounced as a “pact with the devil”. The FBI has been allowed to impound an Iranian Boeing 707 cargo jet covertly operated by the IRGC through a Venezuelan air charter company, which had been conducting hundreds of flights between the Middle East and Latin America, according to Argentine security officials. It was grounded in Argentina in 2022 through U.S. enforcement of sanctions that blocked the aircraft from being refueled. The pilot was identified as a member of the Quds force, as were the remaining seven Iranians on board, some of whom carried Venezuelan passports. They were returned to Venezuela before Milei took power, preventing the type of rigorous interrogation that may have determined their mission. But Argentine security officials told The American Spectator that the secret IRGC flights involved “ logistics” for Hezbollah cells forming throughout the hemisphere. Argentina was the target of major Hezbollah bombings in the 1990s. Efforts to cover up Iran’s involvement in the bombings that demolished the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center are believed to have led to the 2015 murder of a special prosecutor investigating the case. But Milei has stopped short of an important U.S. objective involving the dismantlement of a Chinese deep space ground station in Argentina’s southern Patagonian province of Neuquen. The station is equipped with a 65-ft antenna and controlled by a company linked to the PLA, which heavily restricts access to Argentines or any outside personnel. While presumably built to guide a projected Chinese lunar expedition, it could also guide hypersonic missiles over the Antarctic for a sneak attack on the U.S., interfacing with Chinese satellite tracking stations in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba. “I’m surprised that the government of Argentina permits the Chinese armed forces to operate in Neuquen. We don’t know what Chinese soldiers are doing with that telescope,” U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Mark Stanley, recently told the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, as Burns and Richardson pressured Milei to close the space station or take control of it. Construction of the satellite base was authorized by former president Cristina Kirchner, a corrupt Gucci socialist who fancies herself the natural heir to the legacy of 1940s populist leader Eva Peron (played by Madonna in the Broadway musical hit Evita). Argentine intelligence officials told The American Spectator that Cuba influenced Kirchner’s anti-American ideology, leading her to tell the Argentine Congress in 2021 that “Argentina’s future is with China and Russia.” Milei’s government is understandably fearful of Chinese retaliations. China can easily destabilize Argentina’s fragile economy and is already threatening to close its interest-free credit line or SWAP system, which Beijing uses to leverage political control over vulnerable economies. Argentina would be unable to pay the $8 billion owed since the peronistas emptied the country’s reserves to finance their profligate public spending, which left Milei with a deficit of $15 billion. China could also reduce key export revenues by cutting its imports of Argentine soybeans, 80 percent of which currently go to China. Milei wants to engineer a free-market-based recovery with incentives to attract private investment while drastically diminishing the abusively bloated state sector and diversifying away from commodities and politically driven trade deals. He was recently touring Wall Street and Silicon Valley to sell his plan. But it could be short-circuited if China exacerbates economic hardships being caused by austerity measures, resulting in mass street protests led by cells of Venezuelan agents who have taken over peronista social organizations and labor unions, according to intelligence officials. Venezuelan-supported violent protests have brought down conservative governments in Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia over recent years and could be coordinated with Iranian-sponsored terror attacks in Argentina over Milei’s strong support for Israel. The U.S. may have to bail out Milei and American conservatives should make sure that the administration does whatever it takes to turn Argentina into a positive testing ground for America’s ability to pull distressed friends out of Chinese quicksands. The post Argentina Is Making Progress, But Not There Yet appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

From time to time, one sees vulgar comments on right-of-center American forums declaring that Canada is a socialist hellhole. Often, this criticism is based on the fact that Canada has a system of so-called socialized medicine. On reading such comments one gets the impression that the vision that they mean to evoke is that of a vast array of death committees lining up helpless citizens to be turned into Soylent Green. Canada is not there yet.  Canada does indeed have a system of government-run universal healthcare, but it’s not at all what these uninformed American commenters envision. Arguably, two decades ago Canada’s health care system was better than America’s. Back then Canada had better morbidity and mortality statistics, better accessibility, and much cheaper drugs at less overall cost than America. That is why the American Left advocated that that was the system that the United States should adopt. (READ MORE: Britain Allows Child to Travel to Vatican Hospital for Treatment) That was then. That ship sailed long ago. Although it’s true that in 1993 when Hilary Clinton was tasked with reforming American healthcare Canada’s single-payer system was worth emulating, by the time Bernie Sanders was ballyhooing it during his first presidential campaign in 2016, it was already in decline. In Practice, Canada Has a Two-Tier Healthcare System The idea constantly promoted by the government in Canada is that Canada’s healthcare system is single-tier with equal access and equal treatment for all. At this point, this is largely a myth. Today recent statistics indicate that more than a million Canadians are waiting for operations that are scheduled months away. Millions more do not have and are unable to sign up with a family doctor for the simple reason that most general practitioners have full practices and are not taking new patients. There are several different ways this is playing out. If you need an operation and are well-to-do and you feel that your condition is life-threatening or it is causing you serious discomfort then you go abroad for the operation, usually to the United States or Europe, cost be damned. On the other hand, if you are smart enough and well-informed you can game the system. (READ MORE: The Beginning of the End for the Soros Revolution?) A few months ago, I woke up one day and my vision was somewhat distorted, which is to say I was seeing “floaters.” I called my optometrist who has a private practice and got an appointment for later that day. After examining me she told me that I had a torn retina and that I should have a laser operation to get it fixed as soon as possible lest the condition deteriorate and I lose the vision in that eye. We both knew that to get a referral to an ophthalmologist who could do the job I would first have to get to see my family doctor. That could take weeks instead of a day or two as in the past and then the referral might take more weeks or even months to materialize during which time I might lose the vision of that eye. Instead, she instructed me to go directly to the emergency ward of the nearest hospital with a good ophthalmology department, that way I could get the problem fixed in fairly short order. That’s how the system works and that’s how you game it. After being examined by the ophthalmologist on call at the emergency ward I would be able to book an appointment with a staff eye surgeon for the very next day. Everything worked just fine — but only because I knew how to game the system. Substantively, then, Canada now has a two-tier system, one tier for the well-off and well-informed, and one for everyone else. Going through this process was itself a bit of an ordeal because, for several reasons, the emergency wards of major Canadian hospitals are something else. First, those million Canadians who do not have family doctors take their problems to emergency wards, which are packed not only with urgent cases but also more routine ones such as mine. Moreover, even though by the time I got there the pandemic lockdowns were over, this hospital was still clinging to pandemic protocols and I had to sit for about seven hours wearing a mask in a little plexiglass booth. Finally, these emergency wards also serve as a depository for homeless people who are brought there by police when they are having a violent psychotic episode. While I was waiting to be examined there was one such person in the ER who had been strapped to a gurney and kept on hollering “My balls are on fire! My balls are on fire!” As much as one ought to pity such a person it does make one’s ER experience even more unpleasant. In the event, there were several security guards present who spent some time discussing what to do. Finally, they and one of the hospital staff donned hazmat suits and went over and gave the poor man a shot of some super-tranquilizer, which quickly calmed him down. This is what Canada’s “single-tier” healthcare system looks like. But the government continues to cling to it as the prime jewel in Canada’s social safety net crown. Canada’s Problem Isn’t Funding But How It Spends What has caused this decline? There are many different factors. A few years ago I learned about one of them up close when I set up a volunteer program in one of Toronto’s major hospitals in which we brought in musicians to entertain patients and staff. At that time the administrative head of volunteers informed me that during the decades that she had worked there, the hospital had decreased its number of beds ostensibly to devote resources to research. Meanwhile, as frontline services were being cut back the highly-paid hospital administration was becoming increasingly top-heavy, and more and more money was being spent on jaw-jaw and less on patient care. Of course, research is important but there shouldn’t be a trade-off between it and patient care. It’s not how much money you have but how you spend it. This was brought home to me when I was in Israel last October shortly after the Gaza pogrom. Israel and Canada are both prosperous countries with almost exactly the same per capita GDP. When I went to a demonstration in Jerusalem with a cousin she tripped and fell and broke her elbow. When we got back to her apartment, she picked up her phone and was able to immediately get a call through directly to her doctor. By the end of their conversation, he had booked an appointment for her to come in three hours later for x-rays — this in a country whose trauma units were still being overburdened by the events of Oct. 7. In Canada, unless the situation was life-threatening, one could never get this sort of immediate care. Israel has a population of about a quarter of Canada’s but aside from offering superior front-line care, it is well-known that it is a world leader in research and innovation. (READ MORE: The Demographic Winter of Our Discontent) The only field of healthcare in which Canada is ahead of Israel is euthanasia. Although Canada was late to this game compared to some European nations such as the Netherlands and Belgium it has jumped ahead of everyone else in broadening the criteria for who is eligible for this treatment and has even contemplated euthanizing the mentally ill. The government has even taken to boasting how much money it has been saving by putting down an increasing number of eligible patients—which is chump change compared to what it is spending on top-heavy administration–so perhaps Canada will get to its Soylent Green moment before anyone else after all. America has its own troubled healthcare system about which much has been written so there’s no point in comparing the two countries here. That being said Americans have no right to accuse Canada of being a socialist hellhole. As far as socialist diseases are concerned — DEI, BLM, CRT — they have all originated in the U.S. and in turn been exported to Canada. And by now there are many Canadians who wish that America would also export the cure for these cultural-Marxist maladies.  The post Healthcare in Canada Wasn’t Always This Way appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In her political ads in the leadup to last week’s EU parliamentary elections, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen bizarrely walks and jogs through a forest in her native Germany as she explains why she’s running. That she would retreat to the woods to make her electoral pitch is fitting for the ruling class she represents. Across the Rhine from Strasbourg’s European Parliament building, in the dingy border town Kehl, a newly built mosque towers over the train station and greets arrivals to Germany. In the central region of Thuringia, the German national soccer team participated in anti-terrorist drills with local special forces during preparations for the 2024 European Championships, which Germany will host. (The team will wear purple and pink uniforms to reflect the “diversity of the country.”) The economy faces continued anemic growth, if not outright recession, as the country grapples with a dearth of Russian energy and aggressive climate regulations, among other structural flaws. Just as elsewhere in Europe, farmers have been in revolt. (RELATED: French Farmers Are Fighting Woke Climate Policies in Paris With Tractors) Political violence has also been on display. On May 31, an Afghan migrant fatally stabbed a police officer and injured five others at an anti-Islamism rally in Mannheim. Video of the stabbing spree circulated online and instilled little confidence in police preparedness. One week later, again in Mannheim, an Antifa activist stabbed a politician of the populist-nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. Politicians of both populist and establishment stripes have been targets of violence this year, with predictably disparate reactions from media and politicians. These developments might plausibly be dismissed as cyclical blips, likely to subside in a year or two. But another development, namely the widespread opposition to state-sanctioned immigration and multiculturalism, is unprecedented in the modern era. First, AfD has attained record popularity, despite a cordon sanitaire strictly enforced by establishment parties. The populists even achieved a shocking second-place result in last week’s elections, a historical occurrence. (RELATED: A Message From Europe) In one headline development preceding the elections, a regional court tagged AfD politician and former model Marie-Thérèse Kaiser with a fine of €6,000 and a criminal record for a 2021 Twitter post noting the extreme overrepresentation of Afghans in official government statistics on gang-rape crime. Elon Musk responded, “Are you saying the fine was for repeating accurate government statistics?” A quarter-century-old dance tune paired with the words Ausländer raus! (Foreigners out!) has caused a societal furor. Police are investigating young partygoers shown in a video from the North Sea island Sylt. Some of those depicted reportedly lost their jobs, and one German politician demanded a maximum five-year prison sentence for participants. Nonetheless, the song has attained positions one and two (in different track lengths) on German charts. Then, a poll from state broadcaster ARD suggested that 21 percent of Germans would prefer to see more white German players on the national soccer team. (According to soccer database Transfermarkt, nine of the 28 players in Germany’s Euro 2024 tournament squad were initially eligible to play for another country; six players in the Turkey squad were born in Germany.) The inevitable hand-wringing ensued. (READ MORE: What Europeans and Americans Really Want) These are not intellectually compelling arguments for change, but they are remarkable in that they emerged in a Germany where national sentiment is tightly — even legally — suppressed. The partygoers and provocative pollsters might more constructively have asked, “You say this is a democracy, but when did we have a say in any of this?” The controversies should be analyzed in that light. Germany’s manifest policy failures should also be analyzed from a context broader than Angela Merkel’s brazenly unilateral decision to admit over one million migrants — mostly young, male, and Muslim — in 2015. In his 2009 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell notes that 2.6 million Gastarbeiter (guest workers) lived in West Germany by 1973. “Recruiting, vetting, and medically examining replacements was expensive. So corporations pressured the government to make Gastarbeiter contracts renewable, to let workers’ families join them in Germany, and to permit those who had formed families to stay…Virtually no one in Germany would have considered this an acceptable outcome at the time the Gastarbeiter program was launched.” That last assessment has remained true throughout the German immigration saga. By 2006, Germany had a foreign population of over seven million. In The Last Days of Europe, published in 2007, Walter Laqueur details German society’s immigration-related struggles with “ghettoization, re-Islamization, high youth unemployment, and failure in the educational system.” Indeed, the Afghan responsible for the Mannheim police stabbing arrived in 2013, two years year before Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” pronouncement. Merkel might have performed a coup de grâce, but Germany would be in largely the same position without her tenure. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 118: Conservatives Win European Elections, Shocking Leftist Elites) Germans are increasingly saying they’ve had enough, Nazi accusations be damned. Though the liberal establishment might be buckling, it does not intend to go quietly. Chancellor Olaf Scholz is among those piling on the Sylt partygoers. Establishment parties have conspired in recent years to ban AfD. The party lost a recent court case contesting the state security service’s directive to monitor AfD as a security threat. Earlier this year, the Bundestag passed a law to remove “extremist” civil servants and potentially deny their pensions. According to a June 6 press release, German police have recently raided over 70 homes in investigations of “online hate posting.” Germany’s Catholic Church, renowned for its doctrinal heterodoxy, has regularly jabbed AfD. Finally, Der Spiegel last month published a cover with a swastika superimposed onto the modern German flag and the headline Nichts Gelernt? (“Nothing Learned?”) This specter of jackboots, so often conjured by the establishment class, is highly contrived. Nonetheless, something must fill the vacuum of decrepit liberalism in a country that has been demographically wrecked, culturally neutered, and bled dry for profit. A woodland banishment for figures like von der Leyen should be a productive start. The post Germans Say They’re Fed Up, Nazi Accusations Be Damned appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from We Are Change:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Martin Jay, Strategic Culture: As the election results show, far-right MEPs now hold a considerable part of the European parliament. Will Ursula von der Leyen, if re-elected, fight them or accommodate their ideas? The EU has just experienced a monumental change, following years of failed immigration policies, which has ushered in a massive number […]

According to Decision Desk HQ, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in two states that chose the Democrat candidate in the 2020 presidential election. In the latest figures, Trump is ahead of Biden in Minnesota and Virginia. “Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by 0.2% in Virginia and 1.6% in Minnesota according to Decision Desk HQ/@thehill’s latest polling averages,” Decision Desk HQ wrote. Donald Trump leads Joe Biden by 0.2% in Virginia and 1.6% in Minnesota according to Decision Desk HQ/@thehill's latest polling averages. pic.twitter.com/6vf3evh9Uq — Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) June 14, 2024 * Images from Decision Desk HQ X Post * Trump leads Biden in Minnesota polls, a state that Republicans haven’t won since 1972. Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/Ha4pazCwJx — AF Post (@AFpost) May 9, 2024 A McLaughlin and Associates poll also found Trump leading Biden in Minnesota. In a two-way race, Trump led Biden 47 percent to 45 percent. Eight percent of respondents were undecided. The poll also showed Trump ahead of Biden in a four-way race and six-way race. Just in: New polling shows President Trump leading in Minnesota over Biden. Two Way Race Trump 47% Biden 45% Undecides 8% Four Way Race Trump 44% Biden 39% Stein 5% Oliver 1% Undecides 11% Six Way Race Trump 41% Biden 37% RFK Jr 7%… pic.twitter.com/ggDMFrMEur — The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) June 14, 2024 #New General Election Poll – Minnesota Trump 47% (+2) Biden 45% Biden won in 2020 with 7% McLaughlin () #F – 600 LV – 6/11 — Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) June 14, 2024 Donald Trump highlighted the poll on Truth Social. Trump met with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to discuss how to flip Virginia red in the 2024 election. Trump, Youngkin meet for first time as GOP eyes winning Virginia in November: Former President Donald Trump met with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and the two discussed efforts to flip the Old Dominion red in the 2024 election. https://t.co/U6oNPPPd31 pic.twitter.com/MCAtFRjw89 — JPNWMN (@JPNWMN) June 14, 2024 Per Fox News: Two sources with knowledge of the meeting told Fox News Digital on Thursday that Trump and Youngkin had discussed recent polling showing Trump neck-and-neck with President Biden in the Old Dominion State, after Biden won the state by 10 points in 2020. The meeting included discussions on how Trump can pull ahead of Biden as the election cycle further intensifies. The pair also discussed the issues of energy, inflation and trade. The meeting is described as a first ever between the 45th president and Youngkin, who was elected governor in the state’s 2021 election. Youngkin is the state’s first Republican governor since Bob McDonnell’s tenure from 2010 to 2014. Virginia has voted for Democrats in each presidential election since President Barack Obama’s first campaign for the White House in 2008. Virginia, which is home to many who work in neighboring Washington, D.C., has not been considered a battleground state in the 2024 election, but recent polling indicates that it could play out to being a tighter than anticipated race. Youngkin has previously said that Virginia “is in play” and could deliver a win to Trump come November. In related news, Trump revealed he is considering Youngkin as vice president. Trump Adds Another High Profile Name To Potential VP List

The Department of Justice will not prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland after the House of Representatives voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. JUST IN: House Votes To Hold Attorney General Merrick Garland In Contempt Of Congress Garland defied subpoenas from the House Judiciary and Oversight committees demanding he turn over audio recordings from Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. BREAKING: Justice Department won't prosecute Garland for contempt, says refusal to provide audio wasn't crime - AP — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 14, 2024 Per CBS News: Carlos Uriarte, assistant attorney general, told House Speaker Mike Johnson in a letter that it is the Justice Department's longstanding policy not to bring contempt charges against an official who declined to turn over subpoenaed information subject to a president's assertion of executive privilege. Mr. Biden invoked executive privilege over the audiotapes of his interviews with Hur, as well as an interview by his ghostwriter, and directed Garland not to release the materials sought by the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability Committees. Republicans on the panel had sought the recordings as part of their impeachment inquiry into the president. "Consistent with this longstanding position and uniform practice, the Department has determined that the responses by Attorney General Garland to the subpoenas issued by the Committees did not constitute a crime, and accordingly the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General," Uriarte, who leads the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs, wrote. Just in: The DOJ will not prosecute AG Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress for his refusal to turn over audio from Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. pic.twitter.com/VkHJZ48fMC — The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) June 14, 2024 "The House disagrees with the assertions in the letter from the Department of Justice, and as Speaker, I will be certifying the contempt reports to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. We will also move to enforce the subpoena of Attorney General Garland in federal court," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said. "It is sadly predictable that the Biden Administration’s Justice Department will not prosecute Garland for defying congressional subpoenas even though the department aggressively prosecuted Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing. This is yet another example of the two-tiered system of justice brought to us by the Biden Administration," he added. The House disagrees with the assertions in the letter from the Department of Justice, and as Speaker, I will be certifying the contempt reports to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. We will also move to enforce the subpoena of Attorney General Garland in federal… https://t.co/YOzqzlKWtE — Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) June 14, 2024 CNN reports: Republican lawmakers have argued that access to the tapes would provide more information, transparency and oversight around the investigation into a sitting US president. On Wednesday, every Republican in the House except one – Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio – voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress. While the Justice Department has defended its decision to not turn over the audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with Hur and his team – claiming the decision was made in part to protect this and future investigations – the Justice Department did make public transcripts of those interviews. In describing the interviews, Hur said that Biden presented himself “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” At the time, Biden ridiculed Hur’s report and questions about his memory. “Their task was to make a decision over whether to move forward with charges in this case,” Biden said during a press conference following the report, noting that Hur did not move forward with charges. “For any extraneous commentary they don’t know what they’re talking about. It has not place in this report.”