The Patriot Post® · Monday: Below the Fold

By Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/110228-monday-below-the-fold-2024-09-16

Security

  • Yes, the would-be assassin is a Democrat darling: It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the mainstream media tries to push the latest assassination attempt against Donald Trump off the front page. Because the alleged would-be assassin, 58-year-old Ryan Routh, is a Trump hater and a Democrat darling. Just last year, for example, The New York Times wrote about Routh “seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban.” And unlike the previous Trump assailant, Routh was a frequent and outspoken poster on social media, and he left an incriminating trail. On April 22, he directed a bizarre post to Joe Biden himself: “Your campaign should be called something like KADAF. Keep America democratic and free. Trumps [sic] should be MASA … make Americans slaves again master. DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.” Apparently, unhinged Democrats “show the way” by trying to assassinate their political opponents. Routh’s Facebook page was scrubbed almost immediately, and we can actually see how it happened in real time. Let’s see how long it takes the FBI to acknowledge this. Or to suggest that he was actually “a registered Republican.”

  • Man accused of trying to kill Trump wrote a book urging Iran to assassinate the ex-president (More)

  • Secret Service agent at Trump’s Butler rally was “incompetent,” failed key exam: whistleblowers (More)

  • Both would-be Trump assassins happened to appear in commercials (More)

  • Satire: Media assures Americans the real threat is the side that keeps getting shot at (More)

  • An illegal murders, again: Thank goodness for the UK’s Daily Mail. Otherwise, we Americans might be blissfully ignorant of the murders of American citizens being committed by illegal immigrants who’ve invaded our country at the invitation of the Biden-Harris regime. As the Mail reports: “A family of four were brutally murdered in their upstate New York home in scenes so gruesome, veteran cops were left shaken by what they found. Irondequoit Police said they uncovered the bodies of two parents, a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy in a burned-up house in the early hours of Saturday.” Where’s CNN? Where’s MSNBC? Where are the networks? Some hours later, police announced an arrest: “Julio Cesar Pimentel-Soriano, 34, from the Dominican Republic, was arrested Saturday and charged with second-degree murder for the Aug. 31 deaths of Fraime Ubaldo, 30, Marangely Moreno-Santiago, 26, Evangeline Ubaldo-Moreno, 4, and Sebastian Ubaldo-Moreno, 2.” Sadly, the Biden-Harris open border means we can expect more of these types of stories in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead.

  • TikTok, Justice Department face off in court over potential U.S. ban (More)

  • Venezuela arrests U.S., EU citizens over alleged plot to kill Maduro (More)

  • Activity spotted at Iran’s former nuclear weapons facilities (More)

  • Navy launches USS New Jersey, first U.S. submarine built for both genders (More)

Politics

  • Kamala Harris had her first solo interview since becoming the nominee and it is 11 minutes of pure cringe (More)

  • Former Clinton strategist calls for investigation into ABC debate: “I don’t know what they told the Harris campaign,” Mark Penn, a former top adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, stated regarding the ABC News-moderated Trump/Harris debate. Penn, noting the obvious one-sided nature of the debate, called for an investigation: “I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don’t know how much of this was planned in advance.” He added, “Suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate.” Penn isn’t the only Democrat to criticize ABC’s hosting of the debate; another former Clinton advisor, Doug Schoen, said that Harris “was aided and abetted by two ABC News moderators who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything the former president said.”

  • After-the-fact fact-checks on Harris: Now they fact-check her. Now that the network’s bias has been outed, and now that no one is paying attention, ABC News anchor Martha Raddatz figured it’d be safe to ask a Harris surrogate, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, about one of Harris’s lies from last Tuesday’s debate: “There is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,” Harris claimed. Raddatz responded: “Our fact-checkers found that to be false. There are currently 900 U.S. military personnel in Syria, 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq. All have been under regular threat from drones and missiles for months. We also have action in the Red Sea. Also, every single day, the Navy SEALs, Delta Forces special operators can be part of any sort of deadly raid.” Where was Raddatz last Tuesday? And where were her ABC colleagues, David Muir and Linsey Davis, who crammed hard before the debate to “fact-check” Donald Trump while letting Kamala Harris get away with one whopper after another? To CNN’s credit, the Most Trusted Name in News™ cited “eight examples of false or misleading video posts from [a Harris-affiliated account] since mid-August.” Better late than never, we suppose.

  • Trump was right about Harris on taxpayer-funded trans surgery for illegals: The Leftmedia has made a cottage industry out of “fact-checking” conservatives, but they might also want to start fact-checking themselves. Recently, for example, TIME Magazine had to correct a report on Kamala Harris advocating for taxpayer-funded trans surgeries for illegal aliens. The lefty mag originally reported, “The former President … falsely claimed that Harris ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’” TIME’s quiet correction? “The original version of this story mischaracterized as false Donald Trump’s statement accusing Kamala Harris of supporting ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’ As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.” Other than that, the story was accurate.

  • Wrongly dated PA mail-in ballots to be voided: Election integrity gets a win in Pennsylvania. On Friday, the Keystone State’s Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling that allowed for counting mail-in ballots that were misdated or missing the date. RNC Chairman Michael Whatley called the decision a “HUGE election integrity win,” adding, “This makes mail voting in the Keystone State less susceptible to fraud. We will keep fighting and winning!” With the battleground state currently in toss-up territory, guaranteeing the authenticity of every ballot is crucial to building trust in the election results. Thus far, through the primary elections, Pennsylvania has thrown out more than 4,400 ballots due to dating issues. Joe Biden bested Donald Trump by fewer than 82,000 votes in the state in 2020.

Economy

  • Navient reaches $120 million settlement with CFPB for misleading student loan borrowers (More)

  • A big student loan relief program ends in a few weeks with credit report and loan forgiveness implications (More)

  • Policy: Harris’s housing plan would crush young Americans’ dreams of buying a home (More)

Around the Nation

  • CA restores harsh smash-and-grab penalties: Golden State residents have had enough, as thousands have fled the state over the past few years due in large part to the rampant crime problem. Last Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a crime bill that imposes tougher penalties on smash-and-grab thefts. Damaging property valued at over $50,000 while in the commission of a felony will trigger harsher penalties. “California already has some of the strictest retail and property crime laws in the nation,” Newsom boasted. “We have made them even stronger with our recent legislation. We can be tough on crime while also being smart on crime — we don’t need to go back to broken policies of the last century.” The broken policies were the ones that went soft on crime and resulted in criminals running amok, which forced numerous business owners to close up shop. There is a caveat, however, as this new law will expire in five years.

  • CA wants to add a health warning label to gas stoves: Leftists have it out for gas stoves. First, it was in the name of “saving the planet” and the dubious claim that fossil fuels are causing climate change. Never mind the fact that the expanded use of natural gas is the primary reason that the U.S.‘s carbon emissions have decreased significantly over the last two decades. Well, now Democrat lawmakers in California are taking another tactic against gas stoves: They want to label them a health hazard. Democrats in the state have passed legislation that would require all gas stoves to have a health warning label similar to what is on tobacco products. Of course, California is just the first step in a broader campaign by the anti-gas stove lobby. The problem is that, unlike smoking, there is no significant attributable negative health threat to using gas stoves. This is merely fearmongering by climate cultists.

  • Oregon DMV mistakenly registered more than 300 non-citizens to vote since 2021 (More)

  • Chief legal counsel to NYC Mayor Eric Adams resigns amid federal probes (More)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.