Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) doesn’t represent the people of Minneapolis. In fact, when she stands in front of a crowd and spews dangerous rhetoric, she doesn’t even represent Los Angeles County. When she travels to Minnesota to tell the mob to “stay in the streets” and “get more confrontational,” she only represents one thing: the fringe Left.

Apparently, today’s liberals don’t just start riots in their own cities — they’ll travel halfway across the country to start one in yours. Of course, the woman they call “Kerosene Waters” has been starting fires for years, but in Minneapolis, the situation is different. The entire city is hanging on by a thread. Thanks to the perfect storm of the Derek Chauvin trial and the shooting of Daunte Wright, a community that’s been on edge for days is one court verdict away from a full-scale firestorm. The last thing anyone there needs is an excuse to turn the city into another pile of smoldering ash. And yet, this congresswoman certainly seemed determined to give them one.

“We’ve got to stay on the street, and we’ve got to get more active,” Waters told the protestors Saturday night. “We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.” If Chauvin isn’t convicted of George Floyd’s death, she warned, “We cannot go away… We’ve got to demand justice. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.” If that means Minneapolis burns to the ground, well, it’s not her district. If violence breaks out on the streets, it won’t be her constituents that could lose businesses, property, their sense of safety, and sleep. As for the Left’s double standard on violence, Waters is the current standard-bearer.

After all, this is the same woman that thought Donald Trump should be impeached for “inciting violence” on January 6. “We’re not going to support these kind of dangerous protestors,” she insisted. Three months later, she’s not just supporting dangerous protestors — she’s leading the charge! Outraged Republicans like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) couldn’t believe his ears. “Maxine Waters is inciting violence in Minneapolis — just as she has incited it in the past. If Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi doesn’t act… I will bring action this week,” he warned.

As the video of her comments started to spread, the condemnation got even louder. “Why is Maxine Waters traveling to a different state trying to incite a riot? What good can come from this?” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) demanded to know. Obviously, Congressman Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said, “The radical Left don’t care if your towns are burning, if there’s violence in your streets, or if the police are too defunded to defend their communities. As long as the Left appeases their anti-America base, their job is done.” Democrats are “actively encouraging riots and violence,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned. “They want to tear us apart.”

By Sunday night, #ImpeachMaxineWaters started trending on social media — forcing the congresswoman onto MSNBC to try to clean up the mess. I was only there, she argued, as “kind of an Auntie Maxine” to lend support. “We have to give support to our young people,” she argued. “…Minneapolis is a great example of what is wrong with the criminal justice system, what’s wrong with policing. And so those of us who hold significant positions must stand up. We must support them, we must speak out, we must call for justice.”

But confrontation isn’t justice. And while the freedom of speech gives Maxine Waters — and every American — the right to say irresponsible and stupid things, the hypocrisy here is astounding. By her own standards, the New York Post editors write, “Maxine Waters should be impeached and removed.” And yet her own party — the one who tried to remove President Trump for lesser crimes — is silent. So are the woke CEOs who cut ties with Republicans after January 6. Where are the heads of Apple, Disney, Walmart, and Amazon who were supposedly so committed to “the principles of democracy” and a “peaceful transfer of power” that they stopped contributions to senators who condemned the Capitol siege? M.I.A.

And when it comes to incivility, this is hardly Waters’s first offense. Back in 2018, she urged Democrats to flat-out harass Trump officials. “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” This weekend’s comments were just as volatile. And yet, she still has a Twitter account, a Facebook profile, and her committee assignments. If anyone’s waiting for justice, it’s conservatives.

Originally published here.

HHS Chief’s New (Re)search and Destroy Mission

If you think destroying perfectly healthy babies in the womb is horrible, imagine letting scientists pick through the bodies for parts. Based on last Friday’s announcement, Democrats are perfectly fine with both. “We believe that we have to do the research that it takes to make sure that we’re incorporating innovation,” new HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra insisted when he reversed the ban on fetal tissue experimentation. But just how effective is this ghoulish “innovation?” Not very, experts say.

It’s been four years since David Daleiden’s Center for Medical Progress pulled the curtain back on the abortion industry’s baby shop of horrors. In one undercover video after another, CMP caught staffers at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood casually haggling over baby organ prices like trinkets at a local bazaar. With amazing nonchalance, the group’s leaders tamely describe how they coach clinics to perform abortions that minimize the damage on the baby’s profitable parts.

At one point the gory details about the black market were enough to give even Hillary Clinton second thoughts. “Disturbing,” she said when the footage first came out. Now, one House select panel, 15 criminal referrals, and an FBI investigation later, Democrats have changed their tune. Experimenting on dead aborted babies is more than okay — it’s encouraged! Under Biden’s HHS, anything goes.

“Not to be too graphic,” Dr. David Prentice said on “Washington Watch,” “but we’re talking about body parts from aborted babies… There are literally ‘tissue procurement people’ — that’s what they are called — which is a euphemism for somebody that’s basically scavenging corpses for body parts, baby brains, baby hearts, baby livers, other body parts. They collect these from Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists, and then they will pass them on to researchers who think that they need fetal tissue to do various types of experiments to test drugs and chemicals or to just see what’s happening at some point during human development.”

But here’s the thing, said Dr. Prentice. “The sad fact is that this is really antiquated research. Obviously, it’s unethical. We’re scavenging body parts just like scavenging parts from old used cars.” And, he pointed out, misleading women to do it. Under the Trump administration, America shut down this barbaric research where government scientists and labs were concerned. Taxpayer dollars, the president decided, shouldn’t help create a market for fetal tissue — especially when moral alternatives exist that are already helping patients!

“What the Biden administration and Secretary Becerra did [Friday],” the vice president for the Charlotte Lozier Institute explained, “was a 180-degree reversal. They’ve done away with any sort of ethical overview of this. They have decided that, yes, government scientists can use our taxpayer dollars to traffic in these aborted baby body parts and use them for research. There will be no ethical oversight. The foxes will be guarding the henhouse… So NIH researchers will review the science and then and send out millions of dollars for research with aborted baby parts.”

As outrageous as that is from a moral standpoint, Dr. Prentice argued, it’s even more upsetting from a scientific perspective. “Aborted fetal tissue has never been used to make any vaccines,” he pointed out. “They’ve talked about various drugs that have been made using fetal tissue. It doesn’t happen. They’re not produced with any fetal tissue. This is all trying to paint a nice picture about a need for aborted baby tissues and organs for research when the fact is there is no need for that. It has not produced any good results. And in fact, there are ethical, better scientific ways to do this research — like adult stem cells… We hear so often about embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue and all of the great treatments and cures, when the fact is nobody’s been cured using fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells. But there are over two million people around the globe whose health is better, whose lives have been saved with adult stem cells.”

So not only are we wasting money under President Biden — we’re wasting lives. This isn’t done out of necessity, like Democrats claim. We’re taking grants and successful therapies away from patients to do what Dr. Prentice calls “grotesque research.” And because of how HHS handled this, it goes into effect immediately. “Virtually immediately, government scientists can start ordering baby body parts for their research and resume that taxpayer-funded research with fetal tissue.”

What can people do? The first thing they should always do: contact their elected officials. We need to remind Congress that we’re a nation that respects human life. We need programs that help patients — not politically-minded scientists.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.