Cross-Examination

• Venezuelan illegal arrested for murder of Georgia nursing student: Laken Riley was, like Mollie Tibbets before her, someone’s daughter. Tibbets, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student, was out for a jog on July 18, 2018, when she was stabbed to death by a 26-year-old illegal immigrant who then dumped her body in a remote Iowa cornfield. And this weekend we learned that the murderer of the 22-year-old Riley, an Augusta University nursing student who was also out for a jog, was another 26-year-old illegal immigrant — this one a Venezuelan who crossed into the U.S. at El Paso, where he was released due to a lack of detention space. He then made his way to New York City, where last year a man matching his description was arrested for endangering a five-year-old child. So he could’ve been locked up or at least deported, but not in a sanctuary city like New York and not in Joe Biden’s open-border America. “Laken was an amazing daughter, sister, friend and overall person in general,” her family said in a statement. “Her love for the Lord was exemplified in every aspect of her life. She will be missed every day, but we promise to honor her life moving forward in a very big way.” Laken Riley’s blood is all over this president’s hands. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has published a letter asking why Joe Biden is standing in the way of those who would protect our children against his malfeasance. As our Mark Alexander notes, “The Biden administration has deliberately prohibited any national database of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens he has invited into our country,” adding, “Every violent crime committed by Biden’s illegal pawns needs to be hung around his neck.”

• NY AG gets her pound of flesh from NRA: On Friday, a New York jury in a civil corruption lawsuit brought against former National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre and the nation’s leading Second Amendment advocacy organization found them liable. Back in 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James vowed to take down the NRA. After a three-year investigation, she has not completely taken out the NRA, but she has significantly damaged the organization. Of course, it’s not as if LaPierre, who resigned from the NRA last month after having steered the organization since 1991, is without controversy. Indeed, while James’s motives for targeting the NRA were undeniably political, the jury’s decision appears to validate claims raised by two former high-profile NRA members, former NRA President Oliver North and board member Allen West, both of whom sounded alarms over financial mismanagement by LaPierre. The jury found that LaPierre cost the NRA $5.4 million, with money spent on vacations, private jets, an expensive wardrobe, and personal landscaping around his home.

• Massive cyberattack hits U.S. healthcare system: Last week, the nation’s largest healthcare system suddenly went dark. Change Healthcare, which is part of the United Healthcare system and accounts for roughly a third of America’s healthcare, was hit by an unprecedented cyberattack by a yet-to-be-named nation-state. The attack impacted the ability of pharmacies to receive prescriptions as Change Healthcare’s system went offline. Pharmacies had to fill prescriptions manually. The disruption in service lasted a day, but few details have been revealed as to the nature of the attack or if there was any wider impact, such as patient information being compromised.

• The cellular outage harbinger: Last Thursday, tens of thousands of AT&T customers and a few thousand customers of other major cellphone companies were impacted by one of the largest cellular outages the U.S. has experienced to date. While the initial fear was that the outage was a result of a cyberattack, AT&T dispelled that concern, blaming it on “the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack.” Roughly 12 hours after the initial outages began, AT&T noted that service had been fully restored to all its customers. However, what the cellular outage may have served to reveal is just how vulnerable America’s cellular system is. As Florida Senator Marco Rubio observed: “I don’t know the cause of the AT&T outage. But I do know it will be 100 times worse when China launches a cyber attack on America on the eve of a Taiwan invasion. And it won’t be just cell service they hit, it will be your power, your water and your bank.”

• Chicago removes SROs: This’ll teach ‘em. The Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously last week to remove school resource officers from the city’s public schools, beginning by the start of next school year. We can practically see the thugs and the miscreants laughing and high-fiving each other. As NBC 5 Chicago reports: “The vote followed hours of passionate public comment from both advocates of removing school resource officers district-wide and those who supported leaving the decision up to individual schools. The resolution passed will establish a comprehensive school safety policy throughout Chicago Public Schools, ending the practice of school resource officers that initially began in 1991.” What’s really sad here, though, is that despite Chicago public schools being such a hellhole, only 39 of the district’s 634 schools are currently using school resource officers. Instead, the powers that be think this money would be better spent on teachers and counselors rather than safety officers.

• Will Sotomayor be RBG 2.0? Sonia Sotomayor was a quota hire if ever there was one. The 69-year-old leftist is universally — albeit quietly — recognized as the Supreme Court’s dimmest bulb. On top of that, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a child and is in poor health. According to newly released U.S. Marshals Service records, she’s the only sitting justice to request medical assistance during travel in recent years. As the Washington Examiner reports, Sotomayor “was accompanied by a medic during a February 2018 trip she made to South Florida. … The revelation amplifies murmurs among some left-leaning court watchers who have questioned whether she should consider retiring from the bench to allow President Joe Biden to nominate a new replacement ahead of the 2024 presidential election.” Indeed, Democrats are still sore about getting punked by Mitch McConnell back in 2016, when he held firm against Barack Obama’s effort to seat lefty lapdog Merrick Garland in place of the suddenly deceased conservative giant Antonin Scalia. But they’re perhaps even more sore at the Notorious RBG, the once-iconic and now reviled old-school lefty Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a longtime pancreatic cancer sufferer who simply refused to retire while a Democrat was president. Donald Trump took full advantage of RBG’s stubbornness, fast-tracking the nomination and confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsberg’s seat. Sotomayor is now on the clock, and if she doesn’t “voluntarily” hang 'em up with enough time ahead of the January 20 inauguration of the next U.S. president, we can expect the howls from the Left to grow louder and louder.

• Only right-wingers use slurs? The hard-lefties at the once-proud Anti-Defamation League are giddily claiming that right-wingers committed “all” the extremist-related murders in 2023, but they’re lying through their teeth. We need only consider the case of the “transgender” assailant who murdered three adults and three students last March at The Covenant School in Nashville. We know the ADL is lying because three pages of the killer’s rantings were released in November and because the language therein made clear that this disturbed individual was a hater of a different sort. As The Daily Signal reports: “Her manifesto expresses hatred for white people, whom she refers to as 'crackers.’ The ranting continues: ‘Kill those kids!!! Those crackers. Going to private fancy schools with those fancy khakis and sports backpacks with their daddies mustangs and convertibles. F*** you little s***s,’ she wrote. ‘I wish to shoot your weak a** d**s with your mop yellow hair, wanna kill all you little crackers!!! Bunch of little faggots with your white privileges. F— you faggots.’” Does this sound like a right-wing extremist to anyone?

• Natural law illiteracy: Heidi Prybyla, who is billed as a National Investigative Corresponded for the Leftmedia outfit Politico, in a recent interview with MSNBC sought to ring the alarm bells for the Left’s latest bogeyman of “Christian Nationalism.” In attempting to explain why these “Christian nationalists” are so “dangerous” and supposedly different from other Christians, Prybyla said that they hold to the belief that “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority, they don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God.” Uh, well, yeah. Prybyla might want to take a gander at the document that laid the primary foundational principle and justification for the very existence of this great nation, the Declaration of Independence. Prybyla further invoked natural law, which she clearly misunderstands as justification for claiming that Christians who dare to hold to biblical principles to inform their moral understanding of the world and, therefore, what they hold to politically as merely the rule of men. Natural law is the recognition that God, the Creator, has written the moral law for all humanity onto everyone’s conscience. While corrupted by sin, everyone still has an innate sense of right and wrong, good and evil. The Founding Fathers recognized this reality, hence their appeal to “inalienable rights” from the Creator and not from mortal man.

Headlines

• Trump appeals ruling in massive New York civil fraud case (Fox News)

• Trump beats Nikki Haley in South Carolina GOP primary (NBC News) | Koch network ends financial support for Haley’s presidential bid (Washington Post)

• Biden claims to be champion of blue-collar workers, but they’re donating more to Trump (Daily Wire)

• RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announces resignation as Trump pushes leadership overhaul (National Review)

• Biden told Russian oligarch, ex-Moscow mayor to “be good to my boy” during phone call while VP (New York Post)

• Ukraine desperate for supplies as Russia advances on invasion’s two-year anniversary (NBC News) | Schumer leads Democrat delegation to Ukraine amid standoff over military aid (NBC News) | Voters, 2-1, want America fixed before funding Ukraine’s defense (Washington Examiner)

• Air Force member dies after setting himself on fire at Israeli embassy in DC yelling “Free Palestine” (New York Post)

• Palestinian prime minister resigns amid calls to reform Palestinian Authority (Axios)

• Journo Taylor Lorenz meets with Libs of TikTok creator, makes stunning admission (Daily Wire)

• Small high-altitude balloon of unknown origin flying over western U.S., poses “no threat” to national security (New York Post)

• State universities are teaching students to blow up oil pipelines (Daily Wire)

• There are more illegal migrants in the U.S. than the population of 36 states (Townhall)

• Satire Get a load of these insane Christian nationalists who believed rights come from God and not the government (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.