Cross-Examination

• Biden again threatens Americans with tired old line: Joe Biden reprised one of his favorite threats against Americans over their Second Amendment rights. That amendment, Biden insists, doesn’t grant the right to own “a weapon of war,” and it “doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want.” Biden also falsely claimed that “it says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own.” He then repeated a phony revisionist history lesson, claiming: “Even when [the Second Amendment] was passed, you couldn’t own a cannon. You can’t own a machine gun.” Biden then criticized 2A advocates’ accurate observation that the Second Amendment exists as a means of defending Liberty against government tyranny. “You know,” he said, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is — you know, the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15.” Har har… So, if Biden suddenly doesn’t believe that an AR-15 is a “weapon of war,” then why does he want to ban it?

• Gun-grabbers target future lawyers: As has often been noted, those who attack the Second Amendment are not merely attacking Americans’ right to bear arms; they are also engaged in attacking Americans’ fundamental rights to individual liberty. Case in point comes via the anti-Second Amendment groups the Giffords Law Center and March for Our Lives, which have launched a campaign “to fight gun violence” by seeking to get law students to sign a pledge to refuse to represent the firearms industry. This action not only aims to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights but also their Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The online pledge calls on law students to agree to “not work for any firm that requires me to advocate on behalf of the gun industry or gun lobby.” It further adds that signees “will instead prioritize firms that actively fight gun violence and the industry that propagates it.” The pledge is nonbinding, but it’s intended as a moral litmus test for young lawyers.

• Illegal aliens in the U.S.: Recent analysis of the number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. estimates that the population sat at roughly 17 million as of 2021. The analysis was conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and it comes in at a higher number than other immigration tracking groups that estimate 11 million illegal aliens. FAIR’s report states, “This estimate is also a 2.3 million increase from our end-of-2020 estimate, meaning the illegal alien population increased 16 percent nationwide during just the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.” The report does acknowledge that no one knows “exactly how many people cross the border illegally and evade immigration authorities, nor can anyone accurately quantify overstays or gotaways.” However, due to Joe Biden’s de facto open-border policy, it’s a good bet that FAIR’s higher estimate of illegal aliens is closer to reality than the lower numbers being claimed by the Biden administration.

• Reckoning with pandemic learning deficits: The COVID pandemic has been over for some time, but the fallout from the government’s overreaction to the virus continues to negatively affect the country. Specifically, the young Americans who were least endangered by the pandemic are experiencing some of the worst side effects of the government’s lockdown and social distancing “solution.” Confirming this reality was Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, who admitted that the Biden administration knew “the pandemic would have a devastating impact on students’ learning across the country” and that it will “take years of effort and investment to reverse the damage as well as address the 11-year decline that preceded it.” Correction: The response to the pandemic. The decline Cardona speaks of is students’ continued decreasing reading and math scores, now at the lowest levels for 13-year-olds since the 1990s. And those showing the biggest decline in scores are minority students. As much as Democrats and the teachers unions may claim they were only acting to “save” the children, the evidence demonstrates the opposite.

• Same-sex orgies OK, says Biden monkeypox czar: Sexual debauchery shouldn’t be publicly frowned upon but rather supported. That was effectively the message from Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, Joe Biden’s National Monkeypox Response Deputy Coordinator. Daskalakis made his comments in a recent interview with MSNBC, where he expressed his concern over “stigma” associated with those engaged in homosexual promiscuity. He argued that health officials should instead “get the word out in a way that supports people’s joy as opposed to, you know, calling them risky.” He continued: “One person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night, for that matter. So, we have to sort of embrace that with joy and make sure that folks know how to keep themselves safe.” Conservative media pundit Erick Erickson responded, “It really is freaking outrageous that the Administration that insisted we not go see our grandparents in the hospital during COVID doesn’t want to come between people’s ‘joy’ when they want anal orgies during monkeypox season, which they now call ‘mpox’ because of ‘stigma.’”

Headlines

• House censures Adam Schiff for leading Trump-Russia probe (National Review)

• FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigators had clear “personal bias,” ignored “red flags,” Durham testifies (National Review)

• Durham says FBI agents “apologized” to him for Trump-Russia investigation (Daily Caller)

• “If you wanna go there”: Durham hits back at Schiff over false attacks (Townhall)

• “We did not give our consent”: Riley Gaines blasts the NCAA for exposing female athletes to male genitalia (National Review)

• Lawyer for Rapper Kodak Black complains client got three years for Hunter Biden’s gun crime (Free Beacon)

• Blinken says he “made very clear” U.S. “would have deep concerns” about Chinese military activities in Cuba (CNN)

• TikTok acknowledges that some Americans’ data are stored in China (Washington Examiner)

• Putin masterminded botched assassination attempt on double agent in Miami (NY Post)

• Missing sub boss brags about not hiring experienced “white guys” with military backgrounds (Free Beacon)

• Ohio moms react to “vicious” school reporting them to FBI after exposing critical race theory (Fox News)

• It’s been five years since Greta Thunberg warned climate change would “wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years” (Free Beacon)

• Policy: Is Social Security reform politically possible? (AEI)

• Satire: Judge finds Hunter Biden guilty of being “a lovable little rascal with a heart of gold” (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.