Kamala's Last-Ditch Pitch To Black Men Is A Dream For Scammers, Fraudsters

'It was incredibly toxic'

The court issued no detailed explanation for its decision

'The issues are on the Republican side'

'It’s my intention that Mr. DePape will never get out of prison'

GREENVILLE, N.C. —Entrepreneurship is in Fred George’s bloodline.   “Every ancestor I know was a businessman,” George told The Daily Signal, as he stood on the floor of one of his five secondhand Trade It! retail stores in North Carolina. “I’ve got decades of experience, and the things that I learned growing up from my dad, who’s a businessman, he learned from his dad,” he said.   Trade It! operates somewhat like a pawn shop, but without the cash loan component. Individuals sell items, whether a TV, a watch, or a piece of furniture, to the store and then the store resells the items.  Fred George’s owns the Trade it! secondhand retail store in Greenville, North Carolina. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal) Despite his years of experience, George says he has had plenty of ups and downs as a businessman, but “the [President Donald] Trump years were the best we’ve done,” he said.   “Money seemed to be flowing a lot more during the Trump years,” said George, who also runs a shop where vendors can rent a space to sell antiques, books, records, and other items. “People were spending and earning, and of course, that’s good for everybody,” he said.   A vendor’s booth displays antiques inside Fred George’s Small Shops Mall in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal) George’s multivendor shop and one of his Trade It! stores are located in Nash County, North Carolina, a swing county that President Joe Biden narrowly won by only 120 votes in 2020. George, 60, has been doing business in and around Nash County for about 25 years.   Each of his five Trade It! locations do between $1 million and $2 million in business a year, while his multivendor shop is designed as an avenue to teach and train others how to go into retail entrepreneurship.   Right now, business appears to have slowed, George said.   “People seem to be, I think, pulling back on spending now, because of all the uncertainty and the inflation.”    Inflation currently sits at 2.4%, but was much higher earlier in the Biden administration. “I’m not a member of either party,” George said. “I’m not a big party-politics guy. But as a businessman … I don’t trust [Vice President] Kamala Harris to change things for the better.”   As a political “spectator,” George said he thinks “Kamala [Harris] is far to the left of Joe Biden, adding that despite Harris announcing that she is won’t “tax tips and wants to build a wall, all of a sudden, it goes against everything she’s ever stood for. So, I’m nervous about it, and most of the business owners I know are very nervous about it.”  Whoever wins the election on Nov. 5, George says there are two or three policy actions the next president could take that would be “huge” for his businesses.   Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, aspects of which are set to expire at the end of 2025, so that tax rates don’t increase, would be significant, he said, adding, “I think some of the new rulings by the Department of Labor are hard for businesses to deal with, and I’m hoping that a Trump presidency will see some of those reversed.”   “I’d love to see the world become more affordable again,” he said, adding that he also wants to see “the price of gasoline [go] down, because what somebody spends on gasoline they can’t spend with me.”   The businessman is also a supporter of Trump’s plan to put “some tariffs on Chinese slave labor products that … compete with American products.”   Trump has repeatedly said he will implement tariffs on companies that don’t make their products in the United States. Trump explains his position on tariffs: "And if these companies don't make their products here, then they will pay a very stiff tariff when they send their products into the United States for the privilege of competing with our workers and our now protected companies. We're… pic.twitter.com/pOSq4sjX5L— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) October 27, 2024 George is also supporting Trump because he wants a secure border and is concerned at the number of criminals and gang members who have entered the country in recent years.   Like himself, George says most business owners he knows try to stay out of politics because they want to attract the business of individuals in both political parties, but “most of the business folks I know are pulling for Trump.”   The post ‘I Don’t Trust Kamala Harris to Change Things for the Better,’ Swing State Businessman Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Is Jeff Bezos going to bring back real journalism? In a shocking move, The Washington Post announced Friday it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate, after decades of doing so and after the outlet’s editorial board had written an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Two Post journalists reported that the decision had been made by Post owner Bezos, the billionaire behind shopping behemoth Amazon and rocket company Blue Origin. For many subscribers, Bezos’ action was a betrayal. More than 200,000 people—or about 8% of The Washington Post’s subscriber base—canceled their subscriptions, NPR reported. Several Post journalists resigned. Accusations swirled that Bezos’ decision was influenced by business considerations. (He says he was not.) “The Washington Post has gone from ‘All The President’s Men’ to ‘All The Dictator’s Lapdogs,’” sneered one reader, according to Post columnist Dana Milbank. Another reader wrote, “Without resigning, you are basically endorsing Hitler.” But for the American people, this might signal the beginning of a new era of journalism. USA Today will also not endorse a presidential candidate this year, and owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided The Los Angeles Times would not be endorsing this year either. Indeed, kudos to @JeffBezos https://t.co/UNh4rlB3lS— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2024 In a column published Monday night on The Washington Post, Bezos decided to speak for himself—and in the course of doing so, he also spoke up for the millions of Americans who have watched in horror as major American news outlets have morphed into propaganda rags valuing ideology over truth. “In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress,” wrote Bezos. “But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress.” “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.” According to the Gallup poll cited by Bezos, more than two-third of Americans have no or little trust or confidence in the media. Given the sorry state of news reporting these days, that’s not surprising—and The Washington Post itself has played a major role in why Americans are rightly skeptical of media. Consider the Post’s ridiculously hyperbolic slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That slogan, the first in the Post’s history, was launched in 2017, a mere month after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. So much for a veneer of fairness toward the new administration. And what about the Post’s coverage of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion? The Washington Post in 2021 had to correct and remove significant portions of two articles, published in 2017 and 2019, about the infamous Steele Dossier. But that wasn’t the only thing the outlet should be embarrassed about when it comes to its coverage of Trump’s so-called collusion with Russia. The Columbia Journalism Review, no conservative outlet, published last year a damning review of how top outlets, including The Washington Post, covered the matter. For instance, Post opinion columnist Josh Rogin wrote an article during the 2016 GOP convention headlined “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine,” referring to the Republican platform. Rogin’s report “caught the attention of other journalists,” writes Jeff Gerth for the Columbia Journalism Review. “Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his [New York] Times column, called Trump the ‘Siberian candidate,’ citing the ‘watering down’ of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, labeled Trump a ‘de facto agent’ of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. He cited the Rogin report …” Gerth, who spent decades at The New York Times as an investigative reporter, adds, “The story would turn out to be an overreach.” “Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for ‘additional assistance’ for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done,” he explained. Whoops? Former President Trump speaks to reporters in the spin room after the debate on Sept. 10, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Bob Woodward, the longtime investigative reporter who broke the Watergate story, referred to the Steele Dossier as a “garbage document” in a 2017 interview with “Fox News Sunday.” According to Gerth, Woodward attempted to make the case against the dossier to his Post colleagues.  Those colleagues apparently weren’t interested in what the respected investigative journalist had to say. “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that, and I didn’t force it on anyone,” Woodward told Gerth about his colleagues’ response. Of course, we know now from special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report that the Steele Dossier was indeed a “garbage document.” In an analysis of the Durham report, Heritage Foundation legal scholars John Malcolm, Cully Stimson, and Zack Smith wrote that “the Russian intelligence officers could have fed disinformation to the very people who were ultimately cited in the series of six reports prepared by Christopher Steele—the so-called Steele dossier—on behalf of the [Hillary] Clinton campaign and furnished to the FBI.” Nor was it only Russia collusion where the Post seemed driven by politics, not facts. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Post calculated he made 492 false or misleading claims. But the Post claimed that President Joe Biden only made 78 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days in office. While Trump may talk more and in a looser style than Biden, it simply strains credulity that he was guilty of five times as many falsehoods as Biden in the same period of time. Another clear example of bias was how The Washington Post approached the issue of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and his emails, first reported in October 2020 by The New York Post. Writing on The New York Post report in that same month, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler talked about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s conversations with a Ukrainian lawmaker and commented that those “interactions have given rise to fears that the [Hunter Biden] emails could be part of a broader disinformation campaign.” (Talking to Ukrainian lawmakers wouldn’t be cool until Democrats did it, apparently.) It wasn’t until March of 2022 that The Washington Post admitted the laptop–and the emails—were legitimate. While Bezos may be pivoting, all of these examples took place under his ownership of the paper, which he acquired in 2013. Furthermore, Bezos’ own words suggest that he thinks The Washington Post is more guilty of the appearance of bias, rather than actual bias. “Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first,” he writes. “Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.” But of course, journalists in major media outlets are also failing on the first requirement. That’s not good. Endorsements from the editorial board aren't what killed the reputation of the @washingtonpost, it's the blatant leftwing bias of the reporters and editors on the news side that caused them to lose the trust of so many Americans. CC @JeffBezos https://t.co/lXS2aQfMfZ— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 29, 2024 Sure, I’m grateful to be part of The Daily Signal, which—along with outlets such as The Federalist, Just The News, The Daily Wire, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Caller and more—has risen up in a time when Americans desperately need more options for credible news reporting. But the fact is that The Washington Post employs around 940 journalists. The New York Times employs 1,700 journalists. Prior to layoffs earlier this year, NBC News and MSNBC had 3,500 employees, as did CNN. The Daily Signal currently has 13 full-time employees. You see the problem? Sure, my fervent hope is that The Daily Signal will continue growing and adding new reporters. (Donate here to support our serious news reporting.) But even if we quadrupled our number of journalists, we would still be less than 5% the size of The Washington Post. Good, exhaustive reporting that prioritizes truth is expensive and time-consuming. To thoroughly cover the enormous U.S. government, it’s critical to have a huge staff. Bezos has an enormous opportunity here to use his and the Post’s resources to bring back serious, credible news reporting, reporting that is driven by the truth and the need for the government to be accountable to the American people. He was brave enough to stick his neck out and deny an endorsement to Harris. And he was brave enough, amid the uproar, to defend his position. “I will … not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance—overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs—not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high,” wrote Bezos. “Now more than ever, the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles.” He’s certainly right about exercising new muscles. The Post could start by trying to cover lawmakers from both parties similarly and by adding conservative voices to its opinion pages more regularly. But if Bezos is serious, this could be an amazing opportunity for the Post and for Americans hoping for a serious news organization that informs, not indoctrinates. The post Is Bezos Ushering in New Era at Washington Post? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. JD Vance told The Daily Signal transgender medical interventions for minors are “crazy” at a rally in Holland, Michigan, on Tuesday. “I think sex changes for minors, permanently altering, either chemically or surgically, the body of young child, is crazy,” the Republican vice presidential nominee said. “I can’t believe that we do this. I really can’t.” The crowd cheered enthusiastically for about 15 seconds after his response. Former President Donald Trump has said he would ban sex-change procedures for children without parental consent. The Daily Signal asked Vance if the potential Trump-Vance administration would ban puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and irreversible surgeries for minors in all cases, regardless of parental involvement. I asked Sen. JD Vance if he would ban sex changes for minors. “I think sex change minors, permanently altering, either chemically or surgically, the body of young child, is crazy,” he told @DailySignal. pic.twitter.com/36h6hx8X6y— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024 Vance spoke at a rally outside conservative stronghold Holland, Michigan on Tuesday afternoon, a week before Election Day. One of the most hotly contested swing states, with its 15 Electoral College votes, Michigan may determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The Ohio senator said it’s “sad” that teenagers and sometimes even preteens are allowed to surgically alter their bodies. “We used to in this country recognize that adolescence was a tough time to grow up, that we try to encourage people to accept themselves,” he said. “Now you have some very sick people who when an adolescent is struggling with a problem, they say, ‘No, don’t accept yourself. No, go and surgically alter yourself.'” “That is an insane way to talk to our young people, and we ought to stop doing it,” he continued. Almost 6,000 children have undergone transgender surgeries, while 8,579 have been given hormones and puberty blockers, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database. Nearly 14,000 American children underwent sex-change interventions of some type between 2019 and 2023. Almost 60% of Americans oppose gender transition procedures—such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone regimens, and surgeries—for children under 18, including 47% who “strongly oppose” such procedures, according to Rasmussen Reports. When asked on NBC News if she supports so-called gender-affirming care for kids, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris suggested that life-altering decisions about child gender transitions should be up to doctors. “I believe that people, as the law states, even on this issue about federal law, that that is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary,” Harris said earlier this month. The post One Week Before Election Day, Vance Calls Sex-Change Procedures for Children ‘Crazy’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance said it is “disgraceful” that the Harris-Walz campaign branded Donald Trump’s and his supporters Nazis after Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally. “I don’t care that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz attacked me, and I don’t care that they criticize us for this policy or that policy,” Vance said. “But I think it is disgraceful for a person who wants to lead this great nation to call half of her fellow citizens Nazis because she disagrees with their policy.” Vance spoke at a rally outside conservative stronghold Holland, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon, a week before Election Day. The West Michigan counties of Allegan, where the rally took place, and nearby Ottawa are typical Republican strongholds.  He took issue with Harris likening Trump to Hitler and calling him a “fascist.” Vance addresses MSG rally Hitler allegations: https://t.co/rZ0GectIuU pic.twitter.com/j6SblhpG26— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024 Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Trump’s campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York was similar to the infamous February 1939 Nazi rally at the arena. Vance said the “Kamala Harris strategy” is to call her opponents Nazis. “Here’s what Kamala Harris and her team have decided to do over the last couple of days,” he said. “They’ve decided to compare Donald Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden to a literal Nazi rally almost 100 years ago in this country, even though I believe Bill Clinton, just a few short years ago, accepted the Democratic nomination in Madison Square Garden. When a bunch of people who just want to close down the border and get back to affordable prices gather to celebrate the future of our country, they called us literal Nazis.” “Kamala Harris doesn’t know that at Madison Square Garden that night, there was a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who was about as MAGA as it gets, and he was there to support Donald J. Trump,” Vance said to a cheering crowd. “How dare Kamala Harris call that brave man a Nazi!” “How dare she attack the citizens of her own country for daring to tell her that she’s done a bad job!” Vance continued. “How dare she call her citizens, her fellow citizens, racist for wanting to secure the southern border! How dare she call us fascists for wanting more affordable groceries for our children!” Vance called Harris the “face of disloyalty.” “If you were to look at the face of disloyalty to the United States of America, look in the mirror,” he said as if he were speaking to her. “Don’t attack your fellow citizens.” Vance urged supporters not to “take the bait” from Harris. “I asked for this. Donald J. Trump, he asked for this,” he said. “But our fellow citizens, whatever they’re ultimately going to vote for, we love our fellow citizens, and we want Trump to be president, so that they can have a better life.” The post ‘Disgraceful’: Vance Responds to Madison Square Garden Rally Attacks appeared first on The Daily Signal.