Cross-Examination

• Pompeo not running for president: The field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination did not expand on Friday, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that he won’t enter the race. This news comes as a bit of a surprise given that over the last year Pompeo had appeared to be positioning himself for a run. However, with polls repeatedly showing Pompeo’s popularity stuck in single digits and that he was trailing far behind both Donald Trump and presumed candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his chances of winning increasingly looked slim to none. In bowing out, the 59-year-old Pompeo explained, “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again.” Pompeo choosing not to run likely helps other candidates more than Trump.

• Former Planned Parenthood director’s suicide: The former director of the Southern New England branch of Planned Parenthood, Tim Yergeau, died by suicide last week following a botched raid related to him being investigated for child pornography. Yergeau, whose social media showed him to be a big LGBTQ and abortion advocate, left Planned Parenthood in August 2022 to head the marketing and communications for a theater company. New Haven Police mistakenly arrested Yergeau’s neighbor in an early morning raid, evidently tipping off Yergeau to the investigation of his dark and criminal habits.

• Homeless near Beverly Hills: One of the wealthiest zip codes in America is seeing California’s homelessness crisis creeping closer. Beverly Hills, California, where the median house price is $3.5 million, has recently witnessed the encroachment of new homeless encampments in the neighborhood. The greater Los Angeles homelessness problem has only worsened over the last several years, especially since the COVID pandemic, with the city now estimating a population of at least 70,000 vagrants. Of course, with homelessness comes higher rates of crime, which is contributing to people fleeing the Golden State, and it’s all thanks to leftist Democrats’ policies.

• Musk shocked at government’s access to Twitter: In a soon-to-be-released interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Tesla founder Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter last year, expressed his shock over the degree of federal government involvement in the social media giant. “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter blew my mind,” Musk states in a brief clip. “I was not aware of that.” Indeed, thanks to the Twitter Files exposing the level of government entrenchment within Big Tech, it’s no wonder the Left fought so hard against Musk’s takeover. Furthermore, it served to move the observation and experience of conservative and independent media from mere anecdotally supported suspicion to that of verifiable fact. Washington’s deep state is involved in censoring Americans’ speech on a wide scale.

• Project 2025 — dismantle the deep state: Donald Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, notes the fundamental problem in Washington today: Although the Constitution makes clear the power of the executive lies with the president and “is not vested in departments or agencies … a president today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.” In an effort to confront Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy, which clearly bogged down Trump’s presidency, a group of conservative leaders has come together with the help of The Heritage Foundation to form a game plan dubbed Project 2025. The plan includes four key elements: Streamlining the firing process, limiting union power, improved efficiency, and market-based pay. It also adopts Trump’s Schedule F, which means that “career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms.” Challenging and eradicating Washington’s deep state will be no easy task, but conservatives can no longer ignore this massive existential threat to American Liberty.

Headlines

• McCarthy set to propose one-year debt limit extension tied to spending reforms (Just the News)

• “Teen Takeover” terrorizes Chicago as hundreds of teenagers destroy property, attack tourists (Fox News)

• “Not constructive to demonize”: Incoming Chicago mayor defends teens after weekend violence (National Review)

• Anheuser-Busch CEO offers flat apology following Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney backlash (NY Post)

• Anheuser-Busch rolls out new patriotic ad amid Mulvaney backlash (National Review)

• Judge delays start of Fox News-Dominion defamation trial (Daily Wire)

• Biden accepts 99% of Title 42 entries (Fox News)

• Four killed, 28 injured in shooting at Alabama teen’s birthday party (NY Post)

• An intense rainbow appeared over The Covenant School as families gathered for chapel for the first time since a “trans” shooter took the lives of six people (Not the Bee)

• Buttigieg blames how streets are “designed and built” for racial disparities in fatalities (Fox News)

• Morgan Freeman tears apart Black History Month as an “insult” (Fox News)

• Dramatic realignment swings working-class districts toward GOP (Axios)

• Sudan’s army pounds paramilitary bases with air strikes in power struggle (Reuters)

• Humor: Scholars now believe Bible verse “They were naked and felt no shame” written about Walmart (Babylon Bee)

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