Erin Burnett interviewed Joe Biden, but it didn’t go well. He didn’t address any of Ms. Burnett’s questions and blathered the usual talking points distorted by his dementia. Nothing he said was true, and he made little sense. Burnett didn’t push back – nothing. ERIN BURNETT: “It’s also true right now, Mr. President, that voters […] The post Biden’s Perfectly Awful Interview appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

It’s always interesting to notice what kind of data the government tracks, and what kind of data gets completely ignored. Every couple of years, for example, we get something called a “National Climate Assessment.” If the sea level rises by a millimeter off the Oregon coast, you’ll know about it. We also receive regular government reports on the number of women who decide to take STEM classes and the popularity of nonbinary and pansexual gender identities in places like Honduras. What we haven’t received, for two decades, is a comprehensive update from the government on the number of children who are sexually abused in public schools. It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. Teachers, coaches, and bus drivers were the most common offenders. A finding like that should have led to a national outcry and immediate changes. And indeed, the Department of Education’s report recommended several new policies for screening employees and standardizing policies to make these kinds of incidents easier to report and keep track of. But that never happened. And the federal government has barely shown any interest in the topic in the 20 years since. There certainly was no broader cultural reaction to the Department of Education’s report, either. And that’s a big contrast to other scandals involving systemic sexual abuse. A decade ago, a popular film called “Spotlight” dramatized the work of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe. The journalists discovered a cover-up of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, and they won a Pulitzer for their reporting — back when winning a Pulitzer actually meant something. And then the movie about those journalists was nominated for six Academy Awards and won two. Of course, the Catholic Church scandal received significant attention far beyond that movie and the Boston Globe. A few years later, we got a bunch of “Me Too”-themed movies that no one even wanted, including “She Said” and “Bombshell.” Adult women in Hollywood were victims of pervasive abuse, we were told, and it needed to end. In many cases that was true. And the public outcry in defense of the female victims of sexual misconduct in Hollywood was also immense. Everyone seemed to care. A lot. But again, there’s been no equivalent movement to end the sexual assault of children in schools — particularly public schools, where most of the abuse happens (with the help of our tax money). Why would the sexual abuse of adult women in Hollywood receive so much attention, while the sexual abuse of children receives basically none? WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show Every so often for the past decade, I’ve done a monologue or written a piece asking this question — when exactly will the movement to end this child sex abuse epidemic arrive? I’ve wondered when the public will start to care even a little bit about the rampant sex abuse scandal in the public school system — you know, the place where 50 million American children spend the majority of their formative years. So far, the answer has been “not yet” — even though every other day, we’re hearing about another child who’s been sexually abused by a teacher. Here’s just the latest example, from earlier this week: Here’s one of the text messages: One of my cousins is in the 5th grade, and I can’t imagine a man talking to her how we talk. I know we have a special relationship, and I do love you more than anyone in the world, but I have to be the adult here and stop. Those are her words to a kid who would be 10- or 11-years-old. Apparently, this woman got the child’s phone number after the family invited her to go on vacation with them — the same month she got engaged to her boyfriend. There are so many stories like this, just this year, and even the past month, that it’s impossible to cover all of them in this show. Even if I spent the whole hour on it, I couldn’t do it. But I will go through some of them because it’s important to understand the scale of the problem. For example, just a couple of days ago in Gatesville, Texas, a teacher was arrested for sending sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old student. Watch: This is an 8th-grade teacher — who appears to be old enough to be a grandmother — who was allegedly propositioning children for sex using Instagram direct messages, and asking them to send her pictures of their genitals. She also sent nude pictures of herself, according to police. And the charges are actually worse than what you just heard in the video. One of the charges she’s now facing includes possession of child pornography with intent to distribute. As of now, this teacher hasn’t been accused of physical sexual assault of children, but we’ll see what the investigation turns up as it continues. There are plenty other recent examples of physical abuse happening, though. Three weeks ago in Omaha, for example, police said they caught a 45-year-old married substitute teacher in her car having sex with a 17-year-old student. Here’s that story: In this case, after the police showed up, the student apparently got in the driver’s seat of the Honda Pilot, half naked, and crashed it before hiding from police for an hour.  You’ll hear from some corners of the internet that this kind of sexual abuse is no big deal because 17 is considered legally old enough to consent to sexual activity in some states, including Nebraska. They’ll say it’s a “victimless” crime, even though none of the people saying that would want their son or daughter to be found having sex with a middle-aged teacher in the backseat of a Honda Pilot on a dead-end road at 3:00 a.m. Further, we should note, many of the victims in systemic sexual abuse scandals that have attracted widespread attention have been even older than 17. Again, the Me Too movement began because of the experiences of mostly adult actresses — many of whom willingly had sex with male producers in order to procure film roles. That was seen as a major national scandal, but this sort of thing isn’t? How so? And yet this dismissive attitude has led to so much underreporting of teacher sex abuse in schools. And we can measure that. Business Insider, of all places, just published an in-depth expose of decades worth of sex abuse accusations at one school — Rosemead High School in Los Angeles. There won’t be any “Spotlight”-style movie treatment of Business Insider’s report, of course. But, credit where it’s due: it’s worth reading in its entirety. The report shows, among other things, how often parents are reluctant to call authorities to report inappropriate behavior in schools, even when it’s right in front of them. They don’t want to be seen as challenging school officials, for whatever reason. And schools are all too happy to take advantage of this. On the relatively rare occasions that they do receive complaints, schools often cover them up. In Los Angeles, at one school, that went on for decades, as nearly two dozen victims piled up. Another excuse I’ve heard to explain why the sex abuse epidemic in schools isn’t treated as a major scandal is that, supposedly, the perpetrators are being arrested, prosecuted, and convicted. There is no cover up. But that’s not true. That’s a lie. You don’t get thousands of abusers in your system without cover-ups. If there was a habit of smoking these people out and holding them accountable, you wouldn’t end up with 5 million abused kids in the system, obviously. These cover-ups happen all the time and are happening right now, all over the country. As FOX-9 in Minneapolis found just this week, in response to allegations of sexual misconduct concerning teachers, schools can choose not to renew teachers’ contracts instead of firing them outright. That avoids all of their legal reporting obligations.from the FOX-9 from just a couple of days ago: When a former teacher was charged with having sex with a student earlier this year, police records indicated he had already been fired from a St. Paul charter school. But he wasn’t. Personnel records obtained by the FOX 9 investigators reveal Brandon Bunney was not actually terminated by the Hmong College Preparatory Academy. Instead, his teaching contract was ‘rescinded’ last May after a staff member alerted school leadership about boundary concerns with a student. Had Bunney been terminated, the school would have been legally required to report him to the state teaching board that decides which teachers are allowed in a classroom. But that didn’t happen because Bunney wasn’t technically fired. This is how most jurisdictions handle child sex abuse in schools. They do what the Catholic Church did in many cases. They shuffle the abuser to another school without telling anyone, just as abuser priests were shipped from one diocese to another — for the same reason. And even when the teachers are punished, in many cases, they aren’t punished to any significant degree. In March, a 9th-grade teacher in Lincoln, Nebraska — who had sex with a student ten times — was just sentenced to probation plus 90 days in jail. That’s it. Late last year, a 48-year-old teacher who had sex with a 15-year-old student was sentenced to three years’ probation with no jail time at all. The teacher doesn’t even have to register as a sex offender. By the way, if you think that this light treatment is because the abusers in the public school system are often women, it’s actually not that simple. The 48-year-old predator in that case was a man. One of the few jurisdictions that actually takes this kind of abuse seriously is Florida. Here’s a report from Hillsborough County, from just two weeks ago. “He’s facing mandatory life imprisonment.” That should be the norm in every single one of these schools, K-through-12, where a teacher sexually abuses a child. But it’s not. That’s why you keep hearing so many of these stories. Every video I’ve shown you has been from the past month. That’s how common this is. There are dozens of these stories every month, it seems. And of course, those are just a small fraction of the sexual misconduct cases that get reported. So you have to ask: Has anything changed since the Department of Education’s report in 2004, finding that ten percent of children are abused in schools? Has the problem gotten even worse? It seems that way. Again, the government doesn’t seem interested in finding out. But within the past year, a nonprofit called the Defense of Freedom Institute conducted its own investigation into the data from public schools. They analyzed various reporting numbers that the government makes available, but only if you know where to look. Here’s what they found: Between 2010 and 2019, the number of complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) alleging sexual violence against K–12 schools more than tripled. I’m going to stop there because it bears repeating. The number of alleged instances of sexual violence in public schools has more than tripled in the past decade. It has not gone down. It has not stayed the same. It has dramatically increased. And we’re not just talking about inappropriate communications here. The report continues: For 2015–16, the [Civil Rights Data Collection] reported 9,649 incidents of sexual violence; of that number, 394 constituted instances of rape or attempted rape. For 2017–18, the numbers were 13,799 and 685, respectively—an increase of 43 percent and 74 percent. The report goes on to find that “local teacher unions” often work to conceal sexual abuse by permitting employees to resign — which is the same practice that FOX-9 discovered this week in Minnesota: Unions use collective bargaining and nondisclosure agreements to conceal the records of abusive employees, and union leaders wield their powerful influence in many state legislatures to stymie legislation. The solution, as outlined by the Defense of Freedom Institute, is as straightforward as it was in 2004. Congress should require local education agencies (and school districts) to catalogue and report all school-level data on sexual abuse and violent crimes. Any school district or local education agency that conceals these crimes — or allegations concerning these crimes — should lose federal funding immediately, for starters. But Congress has shown no interest in passing a law like that, because there has been no national campaign about child sex abuse in schools. Certainly, there’s been nothing on the level of the Me Too movement, or the coverage of the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal. To be clear, as much as I’ve talked about the many excesses of the Me Too movement, it’s good that the predators in those institutions have been exposed and — to some limited extent at least — brought to justice. But it boggles my mind that widespread sexual predation in the public school system — a system millions of parents entrust their children to — has not attracted even a fraction of the interest or the outrage. The only way to prevent even more children from being abused is to change that as quickly as possible.

Patricia Heaton said she’s “enemy number one” — and called on others to join her — after an anti-Israel representative labeled any of those supporting Israel and Jewish people “the enemy.” In a post on X, the 66-year-old actress reacted to a clip of Taher Herzallah, rep for American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), saying “Anybody who has a relationship with … or identifies themself as a Jewish person or as a Christian Zionist … they are enemy number one. And our community needs to recognize that as such.” Heaton, who has been outspoken in her support for Israel following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, wrote in response, “I guess I’m ‘enemy number one.’ Anyone care to join me?” I guess I’m “enemy number one.” Anyone care to join me? https://t.co/6yr6Y5cJJu — Patricia Heaton (@PatriciaHeaton) May 9, 2024 The lead singer of Five for Fighting John Ondrasik replied, “I’m in.” Ondrasik previously called out artists who have been silent amid the anti-Semitism raging on college campuses — like the insane protests seen at places like Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian protesters have made Jewish students feel unsafe, as previously reported. The hundreds of comments under Heaton’s post echoed similar statements, with messages like “count me in,” “I absolutely will,” and “add me to the list.” In a series of several other posts, Heaton slammed President Joe Biden for abandoning American hostages after he threatened to cut off weapons to Israel. “Biden has abandoned our citizens.,” the actress wrote, along with a repost of images of five American citizens who are still being held hostage in Gaza. In a second post, Heaton included a screenshot of a New York Post headline that read, “Betrayed. Biden vows to cut off weapons if Israel tries to finish off Hamas.” “This is shameful and dangerous,” Heaton wrote. “WTAF [What in the actual f**k].” She also included a clip of Sheik Ra’ad Salah talking about how they will “conquer the White House” and promising to destroy America, “installing a caliphate in every country and forcing Islam in every home.” “Islam will enter every home in every continent including every home in America,” Salah said. Heaton replied, “Believe them when they tell you who they are and what they’re going to do.” The “Everybody Loves Raymond” star then reposted several more posts, one from The Daily Wire’s editor emeritus Ben Shapiro who called out the president for his “disgusting weapons cut-off threat.” She also shared another post from Ondrasik who wrote, “President Biden abandoned American Citizens and our Afghan Allies to the Taliban. It is shameful, but not surprising, that he now abandons American Hostages and Israel to Hamas.”

Leftist author Judith Butler claims in her latest book that Daily Wire host Michael Knowles is a fascist because of his views that society should not accept transgenderism. Butler, a well-known feminist and proponent of gender ideology, takes aim at Knowles in her book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” In the book, Butler argues that comments Knowles made at CPAC in 2023 about eradicating the ideology of transgenderism from public life were fascistic. According to an excerpt from her new book, Butler discusses a viral quote from Knowles’ CPAC speech where he said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” for the good of society and “the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion.” After the speech, Knowles was attacked by many on the Left who accused him of promoting “genocide.” Even the Biden administration weighed in, with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre falsely claiming that he called for the “eradication of transgender people.” In her book, which was published in March, Butler repeats attacks on Knowles for the speech, quoting the part about eradicating the ideology of transgenderism. “The language of eradication belongs to fascism, and today it is directed not only against trans people but against all those who have been clustered under the signs of ‘gender’ and ‘critical race theory’ and ‘wokism,’” Butler wrote. “The ready definitions for fascism tend to rely on the study of its twentieth-century form, so new vocabularies are required to understand new iterations of fascism that have emerged in the last decades.” Butler’s book has been thoroughly criticized by investigative journalist Chris Rufo, who points out that it is riddled with factual errors and mischaracterizations about Rufo’s own work targeting gender ideology. Knowles responded to Butler’s accusations on his show on Thursday where he critiqued the Left’s ever-changing definition of fascism. .@michaeljknowles had the honor and privilege of being accused of fascism by infamous feminist, gender theorist, and “pioneering lunatic,” Judith Butler. Here’s his response: pic.twitter.com/s6DsYmEQAO — The Michael Knowles Show (@MKnowlesShow) May 9, 2024 On his show, Knowles pointed out that prominent liberal figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would all be considered “fascists” because they all opposed gay marriage at one point in their political careers. The same would go for support for transgenderism, Knowles said, the explosion of which is a very recent phenomenon. CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP “Everyone agreed with me until about 2015, until Obama started to enshrine protections for transgenderism in public life,” Knowles said. “Everybody agreed with me, there was essentially no one in the world who disagreed with the point that I was making at CPAC. So, according to Judith Butler, does that mean everyone was a fascist, except for her?” “This means that the definition of fascism has to change to: whatever the liberals oppose now,” Knowles added. “It’s always changing. For Judith Butler, it’s not being a progressive leftist.”

Hunter Biden faced multiple blows in court Thursday, as a judge denied his motion to dismiss his three felony gun charges and an appeals court also ruled against him. Judge Maryellen Noreika of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware set a three-to-six day trial beginning June 3. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected his appeal, in which Hunter referenced precedent about “former government officials claiming they are immunized from prosecution based on separation-of-powers principles” — even though the first son is not a former government official, and Democrats are zealously seeking to try former president Donald Trump, who is, in state courts. Hunter also tried to have the charge dismissed by saying the government was bound to a “diversion agreement” that would have eventually made the gun charges go away. U.S. Attorney David Weiss drafted the deal, then rescinded it last summer after being embarrassed when whistleblowers provided evidence of the DOJ seemingly hamstringing investigators on the case. Prosecutors could not point to a single case in which they had agreed to such a generous “diversion agreement” for felony gun charges for anyone else, and a probation officer declined to approve the deal. A lawyer for rapper Kodak Black, who received three years in prison for similar charges, said, “There’s no such thing as not getting jail time on a gun charge… 2 tiers of justice?” Nonetheless, Hunter argued to the court that he is the victim of “selective and vindictive prosecution,” and continued to demand documents to prove it even after the judge shut down the argument. He went so far as to demand information about grand jurors, which is normally secret, because “it remains possible that in this highly-politicized matter, the grand jury was selected without regard to the bias that people might have.” CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP The judge wrote, “There will be no such evidentiary hearing.” The DOJ under Hunter’s father, President Joe Biden, has charged 1,200 January 6 defendants, sometimes for conduct as petty as trespassing, in D.C., which voted 93% for Biden, and secured a nearly 100% conviction rate. Hunter’s lawyers also sought to use the court case to compel the production of documents relating to former officials in the Trump administration, including former Attorney General Bill Barr. The judge wrote, “Defendant has failed to show how any of the requested communications among former DOJ and Executive Branch officials could constitute exculpatory evidence,” noting that no one who even communicated with them will testify at trial. The judge noted that the DOJ has turned over voluminous information to Hunter already, including “a forensic copy of the devices seized from The Mac Shop” — an admission that the Hunter Biden laptop is real, despite government officials suggesting otherwise before the election. Hunter’s lawyers previously threatened to trigger a “Constitutional crisis” by having President Joe Biden testify at his son’s trial. Hunter is charged with lying on federal firearms purchase forms that he was not a drug user, despite a raging cocaine addiction. His girlfriend eventually threw his gun in a dumpster. The charge carries a term of up to 10 years in prison. Days after his gun trial, Hunter is slated to face a second trial on nine tax charges in California.

EXCLUSIVE: One Of Trump-World's Favorite Lawyers Hatched Playbook With House GOP On Ending Biden Lawfare Against Trump