Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reportedly intends to raise money for President Trump in Florida and Texas. The Associated Press reports that two people familiar with the matter, who chose to speak on the condition of anonymity, said DeSantis’ finance team is coordinating a schedule to include stops in the Sunshine and Lone Star states. The Florida governor is calling donors, the report claims. DeSantis Plans to Raise Money for Trump in Florida, Texas https://t.co/wKE69FuXtx — Elena (@helen44767171) May 14, 2024 NBC News reported last month that DeSantis privately told donors he intended to raise funds for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Ron DeSantis Privately Informs Donors He Will Raise Funds For Donald Trump, Report Says From the Associated Press: DeSantis is taking concrete steps toward a political reconciliation with Trump, who for months taunted his GOP opponent as “DeSanctimonious” as the Florida governor argued Trump’s time had come and gone. The developments also show DeSantis’ effort to offer among his most prized assets — his prolific fundraising network — in a gesture that could pay dividends if he runs for president again in 2028, when Trump would be ineligible to run if he wins this November due to constitutional term limits. “He’s shown his commitment to the president and that’s why I say we’ll follow his lead, and why I think donors will follow his lead,” said Roy Bailey, a Dallas investor who was a co-chairman of DeSantis’ national finance committee during his presidential campaign, but was not among those to confirm the planning. “We will be focused on past DeSantis donors who have yet to donate to President Trump. We’re going to try to mine those donors for him. That will create a lot of value.” DeSantis, viewed after his dominant reelection in 2022 as a potentially viable Trump rival, raised more than $183 million toward his ultimately unsuccessful Republican presidential primary campaign. The vast majority, more than $145 million, was raised for the super PAC Never Back Down, which could take unlimited sums. DeSantis also raised more than $200 million toward his 2022 Florida campaign. “We are actively working on plans to fundraise in support of President Trump, as well as other Republicans up and down the ballot,” DeSantis spokesperson Taryn Fenske said in a text message to The Associated Press. Ron DeSantis, who pissed away $160 million on the losingest, most ignominious, presidential campaign in history, is planning to raise money for Donald Trump in Florida and Texas, AP sources say. Meanwhile, how's your homeowner's insurance, Floridians? https://t.co/pFXQ5MfKIZ — Lesley Abravanel ? (@lesleyabravanel) May 14, 2024 BREAKING: NBC reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has informed some of his closest donors and supporters that he plans to help raise large sums of money for Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign. pic.twitter.com/SDEki7W82Z — Proud Elephant (@ProudElephantUS) April 10, 2024 NBC News reported last month: The person emphasized that DeSantis had pledged to support Republicans up and down the ballot — “including presidential” — when he dropped his bid for president in January. DeSantis’ remarks come after he was effectively in a political war with Trump, both before and since the governor dropped out of the presidential primary race. It remains unclear if Trump and his team want DeSantis to help them, or have him as an ally, even though the governor did endorse Trump in January. Many of the bundlers who heard from DeSantis at the Hard Rock will likely follow his lead and start trying to raise money for the former president, according to a fundraiser who was at the event. “I would say the majority in the room would now be willing to help Trump,” a DeSantis bundler who was at the recent meeting said.

A boat that matches the description of the boat that killed a 15-year-old girl in Miami, Florida, has been found in connection with the tragic incident.

The FCC announced that it would collect “[d]ata concerning the gender, race, and ethnicity of a broadcast station’s workforce” and make the submissions from each television and radio station publicly available. The FCC is very vague about why it wants this data. They claim they don’t want to determine whether the licensee or permittee is […] The post FCC Will Force Gender & Race Agenda on TV & Radio Stations appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

There are two visions of Western society that are currently on the table. Vision one: Merit wins. Being good at things actually matters.  This vision of society has excellent, positive externalities, because when you are good at things, you end up helping other people. You end up producing goods, products and services that are useful to others. The meritocracy is the only system ever devised by man that actually creates positive effects for everyone else in a society. That is vision number one. Vision number two is the oversensitive Army of Losers society. Merit is discarded in favor of your level of being offended. The more of a failure you are, the more you get to be offended, and the more offended you are, the worse society is. That’s because if the people who are unsuccessful get to run all of the levers of society, and part of what they get to do is declare that their un-success is a facet of their victimhood, that means negative externalities for everyone, because it’s literally the reverse of merit. It is failure of merit. It is lack of merit that now puts you high on the totem pole when it comes to this version of society. This is the sort of conflict that is bubbling to the surface across Western civilization. We’re going to have to choose which vision of society we wish to live in — the meritocracy or the Army of Losers society. With regard to the meritocracy, the backlash has now begun against the Army of Losers society. In excellent news, WRAL News reported: UNC-Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees on Monday approved the transfer of $2.3 million in diversity and inclusion spending to public safety priorities in the 2024-25 budget. The trustees held a special meeting Monday morning. The board is scheduled to hold its regular meeting Wednesday and Thursday. The UNC System Board of Governors is expected to vote next week to eliminate diversity goals and jobs at member institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill. A Board of Governors committee last month approved a complete rewrite of the system’s existing diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. This is excellent. They are saying, “No longer are we going to craft all of our systems around the false, pernicious lie that all disparities are because of societal exploitation and discrimination. Instead, we’re going to do away with all of that, and we’re going to go straight back to the meritocracy. We’re not spending taxpayer money on it. We’re not spending tuition money on it. We’re done.” That is the way that society needs to move if you wish to have a successful meritocracy, a successful society with excellent knock-on effects and an ability to build for the future. WRAL added that one of the members of the Board of Trustees, David Boliek, said, “I think that DEI is divisive. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it gives a return on investment to taxpayers and to the institution itself.” Boliek said that conversations about increased funding for public safety began after the on-campus shooting death of a professor at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year and were furthered by on-campus protests in support of Palestinians. So they are moving all of their funding away from DEI and toward campus safety, which makes perfect sense. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show And the professoriate is upset. One associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Chair of the Faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill said, “Frankly, I was stunned. I have heard from faculty who are very concerned, who are concerned because they see the value in what we’re doing to increase equity and inclusion on campus” Who cares what the professoriate has to say, considering they are the beneficiaries of a system that is directly cutting against meritocracy?  So path one for our societies is to stop this notion that freedom itself, freedom and economics, freedom and association, freedom of speech — that all of these things are tools of the powerful, designed in order to harm others, and that merit itself is somehow a bad thing and a demonstration of power dynamics in a Foucault deconstructionist way.  Then there’s path number two, currently being presented by Disney, which has decided they’re going to ax Tinker Bell from doing meet and greets at the park. This story doesn’t seem particularly big on the surface except that the way that you educate your children matters an awful lot. The way that you deal with things like children’s entertainment matters because kids are incredibly impressionable, their brains are incredibly malleable and plastic. And when you teach them that Tinker Bell cannot be allowed in public view because Tinker Bell represents some sort of exploitative vision of women, you’re creating a society of victims. The predicate for this was something called the Stories Matter initiative over at Disney, which decided that Ursula the villainous sea witch from “The Little Mermaid” (who’s an octopus) was, because of her dark color palette, lavender skin and black legs, offensive in some sort of racial way. Tinker Bell was also marked for caution. Why? Because she was “Body conscious and jealous of Peter Pan’s attention.” Yes, that’s right: Tinker Bell is body-conscious and therefore she is no longer going to be included in the character meet and greets at Disney World. Now let’s be real about the character of Tinker Bell. Obviously, Tinker Bell is in pretty good shape in the movie. The whole joke is that she is a pretty small person who’s in love with Peter. That’s the whole joke of the film. That is part of the relationship between them, which dates back to the original book by J.M. Barrie, but that can’t be included because it might give bad messages to little girls such as “being body-conscious actually matters with regard to mating.” Or it might give off the impression that sometimes girls get jealous over guys, which you can’t have, because obviously it’s true. These minor symptoms are indicative of broader cultural trends. And those broader cultural trends have an impact on politics because when you have the Army of Losers mentality versus the meritocracy, eventually the meritocracy is going to stand up and roar, because it turns out that the meritocracy is responsible for the success and health of any vital society. The meritocracy is created by and benefits the lions of society, the strongest people when it comes to any merit-based activity. Those are the people who are the drivers of growth. They’re the people who are responsible for the tax revenue. They’re responsible for all the businesses being founded. They’re responsible for success in innovation. The Army of Losers, by contrast, is a group of people who literally have taken themselves out of circulation because they were not meritorious enough. Joe Biden has decided that he’s going to focus all of his attention on the supposed Army of Losers, and it is a disaster area for him. The only throughline to his administration is what he said it was: equity. Equity is the lie that all disparities are equivalent to discrimination, and therefore, if you can identify a group disparity in any practice across the United States, that means that some sort of exploitation or discrimination is happening that is correctable by government. I don’t actually know if Joe Biden believes all of that. I think that Joe Biden is basically just a pinwheel of a human being who moves in whatever direction he thinks the winds are moving inside of his own party. And the direction inside the Democratic Party is toward the anti-meritocracy. And guess what? Most Americans like the meritocracy. Moderates, independents, even some moderate-leaning Democrats. It turns out that we like systems where effort is rewarded, where merit is rewarded, where innovation gets better because merit is rewarded, because the incentive structure is properly aligned for growth and health. And this is why Joe Biden is collapsing in the polls.

A coalition of 17 red states are challenging California over regulations that ban sale of new diesel trucks by 2036. The lawsuit, led by Nebraska, argues that California’s Advanced Clean Fleets regulations on internal-combustion trucks and mandate for “zero emission vehicles” by 2036 violate federal law and will have a nationwide impact. The suit argues the regulations will disrupt supply chains, raise prices on goods, and slow interstate transportation. “In a stunning gambit that both violates the constitution and threatens our nation’s economic security, an agency of the State of California has attempted to override federal law and arrogate to itself the power to ban internal-combustion engines in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles,” the lawsuit says. “This attempted ban contravenes controlling law while defying real-world reality and burdening American families and businesses, already suffering from high inflation, with even more costs.” The suit was joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming, as well as the Arizona State Legislature and the Nebraska Trucking Association. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers announced an additional suit against the Environmental Protection Agency for its regulations on tailpipe emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles. Critics argue that these regulations effectively take aim at traditional trucks in favor of pushing companies to manufacture and sell electric vehicles. CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP The suit against the EPA was joined by Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The suit was filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. “California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort — coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid — will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country,” Hilgers said in a statement.

Actor Robert De Niro delivered such an obscene rant about former President Donald Trump that just a few sentences in, producers on ABC’s “The View” had to cut off his microphone. De Niro, who has never been shy about his hatred for Trump, joined the hosts of the midday talk show for Tuesday’s broadcast — and when the topic turned to politics and the 2024 presidential election, the “Analyze This” star began with a Hitler comparison and went downhill from there. Invoking the Nazi dictator right off the bat, De Niro complained that not enough people in the United States were taking serious stock of the potential threat posed by a second Trump presidency. “I don’t understand why people are not taking him seriously because you read about it historically in other countries that they didn’t take the people seriously. I think of Hitler and Mussolini,” he said. “Who does not think that this guy is going to do exactly what he says he’s going to do?” De Niro continued. “He’s done it already. And then what? We’re going to sit around and say, what, we told you so — or whoever, I told you so. It’s going to happen. If he gets elected, it’s going to change this country for everybody. And they might think that it’s going to make their life better and they just want to — excuse my French —” And although he could still be see mouthing words as he continued, the mic was cut briefly. When the sound came back on, De Niro was claiming that Trump’s supporters were only about “anger and hate.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP WATCH: De Niro says Trump "wants to do the worst he can possibly do" to the country and goes on a tirade cursing up a storm, resulting in his mic being cut.Whoopi Goldberg chimes in to claim, without evidence, that if Trump gets elected, he'll be the last president and rule for life. pic.twitter.com/RBCKSBWkZW — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 14, 2024 “He’s done everything,” De Niro said of Trump a short time later. “What more do you need? It’s almost as if he wants to do the worst he can possibly do to show this country —” and just like that, his mic was cut again, but his rant continued. Whoopi Goldberg chimed in then, claiming without evidence that Trump’s plan was to get reelected and then stay in the White House “until he drops dead.” “It’s over,” De Niro agreed with Goldberg’s claim. “We’re going to have such civil strife.”