World

• Venezuela’s duplicitous election: On Sunday, Venezuelans voted in their national presidential election. Exit polls showed that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won the election, garnering 70% of the vote. But that all changed after dictator Nicolás Maduro’s National Electoral Council announced its official vote tally, declaring a Maduro victory by a 51% to 44% margin. No neutral, fair-minded observer actually believes Maduro won. Furthermore, leaders worldwide have begun to weigh in, criticizing the reported election outcome as a fraud. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who granted Maduro relief from sanctions on the condition that he hold fair, open elections, tepidly responded by saying he had “serious concerns” that the official results may not “reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.” Maduro has already failed to uphold his promise to hold fair and open elections after he prevented his biggest opponent from running, so why is the Biden administration not immediately raising sanctions? It’s yet another example of Biden’s feckless foreign policy leadership.

• Third young girl dies after horrific mass stabbing at Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, UK (NY Post)

• China executes “slow-motion genocide” in Tibet and Xinjiang (Washington Times)

Culture

• Rioters’ charges dropped: Never let it be said that the Democrats support our cops. Indeed, although they sanctimoniously decried and vindictively prosecuted some 1,200 January 6 “rioters,” most of whom were in fact tourists, they turned a blind eye toward the violence meted out by Jew-hating leftist rabble last week during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit. As the Media Research Center reports, “Charges have allegedly already been dropped against four individuals who were arrested for physically attacking Capitol police officers during the protests-turned-riots on Wednesday, where pro-Palestine aggressors gathered to throw a fit over … Netanyahu’s visit to Congress.” Two-tiered justice, anyone? But these thugs didn’t just rough up the cops. As MRC adds, they also “sprayed graffiti on several monuments and vandalized public property, including the Christopher Columbus statue and fountain near Union Station. Messages scrawled across walls in paint included the phrase ‘Hamas is coming.’” The lesson? Rioting is fine, as long as it comes from the Left.

• Florida judge permanently blocks workplace-training portion of DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act (National Review)

Olympics

• French officials attempt to gaslight the world: As objections and condemnations pour in from across the world over the sacrilegious Paris Olympics opening ceremonies that featured a drag queen parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” French officials are playing the denial game. The ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, is claiming that the offensive scene was not inspired by “The Last Supper” painting. “There’s Dionysius arriving on a table,” Jolly explained. “Why is he there? First and foremost because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology and the tableau is called ‘Festivity.’” Others have defended the display by insisting that it was actually inspired by Jan Harmensz van Bijlert’s painting “The Feast of the Gods,” which also depicts a table dining scene. However, according to a Paris Olympics organizer, “Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting. He is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art.” Furthermore, the halo-crowned woman in the center of the display posted on X a screenshot of the ceremony juxtaposed with da Vinci’s painting with the following message: “Oh yes! Oh yes! The New Gay Testament!” She has since deleted the post, only to replace it with the gaslighting message that it was actually a depiction of “The Feast of the Gods.”

• Crappy food, cardboard beds, no A/C in Olympic Village: Perhaps, for the organizers of the Paris Olympic Games, there’s a bright spot to the bad press they’ve received due to their grotesque display during the opening ceremonies: It’s drawn attention away from the awful conditions that the athletes themselves are being subjected to. As the UK’s Metro reports, “The cardboard beds in the Olympic village have come in for heavy criticism, with a number of athletes complaining about how uncomfortable the recyclable beds are, while the food being served has also proved unpopular. Australian former Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has spoken out about the problems and feels athletes will be badly hampered by the conditions. … ‘[N]o air conditioning … is going to play a bigger factor as the week goes. It was [68] degrees and raining yesterday. It’s going to be [in the 90s] in the coming days.’” Such are the accommodations in Paris, where the athletes are likely less focused on athletic excellence than their living conditions. Oh, and lest we forget, a poopy river runs through it.

• Polish journalist at Olympics suspended for saying John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a “vision of communism” (Daily Wire)

Government & Politics

• Facebook censorship: On Monday, a spokesperson from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, admitted that its social media platform had censored the now iconic picture of Donald Trump pumping his fist and yelling “Fight!” with blood streaming down his face immediately following an assassination attempt. The spokesperson, Dani Lever, stated, “Yes, this was an error.” She added, “This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed, and we apologize for the mistake.” That explanation did not sit well with a number of Trump supporters, one of whom posted on X, “Funny that the ‘errors’ only ever go in one direction. Just coincidence, I guess.”

• Security squad was short-handed, scrambling for coverage before Trump’s Butler rally, texts reveal (NY Post)

• Acting Secret Service chief “ashamed” of Trump rally shooting security gaps, “cannot defend” shooter having roof access (NY Post)

• Trump agrees to be interviewed as part of an investigation into his assassination attempt (AP)

• Ex-Harris staffers cite toxic workplace: Working for Kamala Harris is no cakewalk. In fact, it’s downright toxic, according to former staffers. “There is another side of Kamala Harris which the general public does not know,” said one former intern who worked in Harris’s office when she was California attorney general. Many former staffers have described Harris as a foul-mouthed, tyrannical boss who made employees stand at attention when she entered a room. Appearing to validate this characterization of Harris is the fact that she has had an “extraordinarily high” exodus rate of staff over her time as vice president. According to OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “Taxpayers can draw their own conclusions about Harris’ management or leadership style, but what we found corroborates comments from former staffers that the vice president is difficult to work for.” She holds a 92% employee turnover rate. For comparison, former Vice President Mike Pence hired 29 employees during his first year, retaining five by the end of his term, equating to an 83% turnover rate. Harris, on the other hand, hired 49 staffers during her first year, and all but four have moved on. Andrzejewski also noted that Harris has taken the unprecedented step of concealing the full list of staffers who work for her and their salaries. “Kamala Harris is the least transparent elected official in the entire country. We don’t know anyone else that gets to shield their spending,” he observed.

• Our $35 trillion debt: Who says the United States no longer leads the world? Certainly not the folks who pay attention to such things as recklessness and profligacy. Indeed, the U.S. has reached another dubious debtor’s milestone, as our national debt has topped the $35 trillion mark. As The New York Times reports, “The red ink is mounting in the United States more quickly than many economists had predicted as the costs of federal programs enacted in recent years have exceeded initial projections.” Imagine that: The debt has ballooned faster than expected under Joe Biden. As The Daily Signal helpfully notes, that $35 trillion “amounts to about $267,000 for every household in the country.” After our federal government’s COVID spending spree, the need for fiscal sanity became more urgent. But instead, as the Signal adds, “Joe Biden pushed an enormous spending spree, helping to fuel the worst inflation in decades. This included gigantic handouts for a variety of left-wing interest groups, such as teachers unions, environmental activists, bureaucracies at all levels of government, and more.”

• Regulations cost families $15,000; Biden-Harris swamp plans more (Washington Examiner)

• IRS tax cheats keep their jobs: Among our many millions of government employees, certain standards ought to apply: Our judges shouldn’t be bribable, our warriors shouldn’t be traitors, and our tax collectors shouldn’t be tax cheats. And yet. As The Washington Times reports, “Dozens of IRS employees who have ‘willfully’ cheated on their taxes remain working for the agency, and some have even been hired back after evasion,” according to an inspector general’s report. According to the report, 5% of the agency’s workforce “failed to pay their taxes in full and on time at some point while working for the agency.” But while most of those deadbeats were deemed to have made honest mistakes, some weren’t. As the Times adds, 70 current employees were found to have intentionally skirted the law, and yet only 20 of them were ousted. As Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst notes, “While the IRS warns, ‘tax evasion is a serious crime punishable by imprisonment, fines, and the imposition of civil penalties,’ the agency is rewarding its own tax dodgers with paychecks and lavish benefits made possible, ironically, with the taxes paid by you, me, and other hardworking Americans.”

Misc.

• Biden admin proposes rule allowing illegal immigrants access to taxpayer-funded college prep programs (Daily Wire)

• The Washington Post faces backlash for misleading front page on Israeli airstrikes (Daily Caller)

• Battleground voters actually like a lot of Project 2025 when they hear what’s in it (Daily Caller)

• Iran raked in $16 billion from illicit oil sales in just four months, highlighting Biden admin’s lax sanctions enforcement (Washington Free Beacon)

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