This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

CNN poll notes significant upward swing since 2016

A new poll shows a whopping 56% of Americans want all illegal aliens deported from the county – so reports CNN data analyst Harry Enten.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

More review needed to determine whether climate organizations can take $20 billion from taxpayers

A video of a former employee of the Environmental Protection Agency last year explained how Biden administration officials were trying to hand taxpayer money out to various organizations and foundations very fast, before the administration of President Donald Trump came into office.

The worker said, "It truly feels like we're on the Titanic, and we're throwing like gold bars off the edge."

Now an appeals court has ordered a halt to the tossing.

A report from Washington Examiner said the D.C. Court of Appeals has put on hold an order from Tanya Chutkan, a leftist whose antagonism to President Trump is well-established in the court records, and had issued an order that gave various climate groups access to the funds being held in Citibank.

The appeals court said it wants to review Chutkan's full order before moving on with the dispute, in which the new EPA managers want to terminate some $20 billion in grants, to save taxpayers from those handouts.

"The purpose of this order is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the district court's forthcoming opinion in support of its order granting a preliminary injunction together with the emergency motion for stay pending appeal and any response thereto, and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion," the appeals court said.

That decision is just the latest development in the fight brought on by three climate groups against the EPA. The funding comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was part of Joe Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which even leftists have admitted was not intended to, and did not, reduce inflation.

Climate United official Beth Bafford said her group stands firm "on the merits of our case." Her group, along with Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, all sued, demanding delivery of the tax funding they want.

However, Lee Zeldin, appointed to head the EPA under President Trump, explained the grant money was distributed improperly, because it was routed through Citibank.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Then he suddenly starts shouting about 'DIGNITY'

Joe Biden, whose son Hunter has complained people don't want to pay him to speak any longer, this week got one of those speaking engagements.

He addressed a national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago on Tuesday.

And he spoke about being outraged as a 4th-grader back in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
"And I'd never seen – uh I'd never seen hardly any black people in Scranton at the time and I was only going on 4th grade. And I remember seeing the kids going by at the time called colored kids on a bus going by," Biden said, suggesting that "sparked his outrage."
He also randomly started screaming about, "SIMPLE DIGNITY. EVERYONE DESERVES TO BE TREATED WITH DIGNITY … REGARDLESS OF WHO THEY ARE."
He also lashed out at President Donald Trump.

"In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has made … has done so much damage and so much destruction."

He cited the thousands of federal workers whose jobs were eliminated at the Social Security Administration, accusing Trump of "taking a hatchet" to the federal workforce.

"Now they're getting ready to push thousands more out."

He also claimed that 30% of Americans now have "no heart."

"It's never been this divided."

A report at the Gateway Pundit pointed out it was his first major public speech since he left office, as his speech at the National High School Model United Nations last week was covered by "not one media outlet."

The report documented how Biden "struggled" in his speaking. And it noted how Biden's "outrage" as a 4th-grader "never happened."

Biden has a well-established reputation for telling stories that never happened.

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Witness: 'It's a bit scary actually, because I physically saw he had weapons and I don't know what his state of mind is'

Even in blue cities where leaders advocate for defunding police forces, residents still expect the cops to arrest people acting threateningly in a public place, especially if the suspect has a knife in his pants and tries to pepper-spray law enforcement officers.

That's why residents of Portland, Oregon, are concerned about city police recently getting into an hours-long standoff with a seemingly crazed man … and then deciding to leave the scene with the armed man still lurking in the area.

This scenario occurred Monday evening when a woman in a Northwest Portland neighborhood called 9-1-1 to report a suspicious character acting strangely.

After an hour, and no police had responded, she called a friend to help her close her office and leave the neighborhood safely.

Later, officers from the Portland Police Bureau arrived on the scene, according to a report by KPTV Fox 12.

Officers tried to take the suspect, brandishing a knife and attempting to pepper-spray them, into custody using a taser and by firing non-lethal rounds at the suspect. Neither of those options had any effect on the man, a police commander said in a report.

Commander Brian Hughes said, "In this case, we had to weigh all the things going on, the potential to injure the suspect himself, the potential to injure officers, and what we deployed here was a third technique of de-escalation."

Such de-escalation looked more like abandonment by many of the Portlanders who were patronizing shops and restaurants in the area.

After getting shot at, the suspect ran into a crowd of people dining outside. That is when officers switched to de-escalation tactics, reported the television station. A crisis negotiator was brought in to talk to the suspect for more than two hours.

"One of the key results was they were learning from the gentleman was that he was not a threat to the public. He had no intention of harming anyone in the area. As an organization you have to take in all those factors when we decide whether or not to use force," Hughes said.

After the decision not to arrest the suspect and leaving the scene, police said Tuesday they'd try to make an arrest at a later time "without putting others in danger."

"It was strange nothing really happened and they left and the guy hung out here for a while," said Scott Rivera, proprietor of Scottie's Pizza Parlor.
Added the woman who called 911, identified only as Michelle: "It's a bit scary actually, because I physically saw he had weapons and I don't know what his state of mind is. Yes, he could be going through something but I don't feel safe and I don't know why he was just left here by police."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Boasberg says a president can 'clear' the case by returning deportees

A federal judge is threatening President Donald Trump and his administration with criminal contempt charges for removing illegal aliens, those who were also described as members of violent criminal gangs, from America.

The judge had ordered several jetliners carrying the deportees, apparently already in flight, to turn around and bring the criminals back to America, and the administration didn't, as it explained the flights already were in international airspace and the judge had no authority for his order.

Now the judge, James Boasberg, who is well known for his open antagonism toward the president, has unleashed his ire.

He claims to have decided there was "cause" to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for refusing to follow his political ideology.

Boasberg now alleges the administration can "clear" the contempt by following his latest strategy to accommodate illegals, likely members of criminal gangs.

The judge said, "Given the finding of probable cause for contempt set forth in the accompanying memorandum opinion, the court orders that; {1) if defendants opt to purge their contempt, they shall file by April 23, 2025, a declaration explaining the steps they have taken and will take to do so, and (2) if defendants opt not to purge their contempt, they shall instead file by April 23, 2025, declaration{s} identifying the individual{s} who, with knowledge of the court's classwide temporary restraining order, made the decision not to halt the transfer of class members out of U.S. custody on March 15 and 16, 2025."

The demand for "steps" suggests that the judge is insisting the criminals be brought back to the United States, a move that the president of El Salvador where they now are imprisoned has said, in another similar high-profile case, won't happen.

The judge, in his opinion, said he had decided that the administration's actions were a "willful disregard" for the court.

Of course, the judge has no resources to enforce his "contempt" campaign.
Fox News reported, "The Justice Department could then request that the contempt be prosecuted by an attorney for the government and, should they decline to prosecute the matter, could 'appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.'"

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Elon Musk: Twice as many cards are issued than the total number of federal employees

The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has suspended almost half a million government credit cards in use by federal officials as of this week, Newsweek reports.

Like a parent canceling the ill-advised gift of a credit card to a teenager, DOGE chief Elon Musk has deactivated credit cards issued to employees of 30 federal agencies.

Since its inception, DOGE has recommended the firing of more than 200,000 federal workers, and 75,000 workers have accepted the Trump administration's offer to voluntarily resign, notes the Newsweek report.

On Tuesday, DOGE wrote on X that it had deactivated about 470,000 credit cards in its crackdown on federal spending.

"Credit Card Update! The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 30 agencies. After 7 weeks, ~470k cards have been deactivated. As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do," the post said.

Musk added on X Wednesday: "Twice as many credit cards are issued and active than the total number of government employees! Crazy."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'The American people don't need an obscure agency to 'protect' them from lies'

One of the most damaging attacks on Americans' constitutional rights in recent years actually came from the government itself, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he's working on President Donald Trump's campaign promise to "close the book" on the "weaponization" of the bureaucracy's agenda to "silence, censor, and suppress the free speech of ordinary Americans."

He's doing that by eliminating organizations like the Global Engagement Center, a key player that once had a huge role in the censorship industrial complex.

In a commentary posted at the Federalist, he explains:
"Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America's long free speech history. The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was 'disinformation,' allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to 'our democracy.' To protect 'our democracy,' this 'disinformation' had to be identified and stamped out"

He then explained that GEC got its start in 2011 as the Center for Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications, responsible for advising the government on how to counter narratives from terrorists such as al-Qaida.

Then it strayed, he said.

"In early 2016, the Obama administration renamed CSCC the 'Global Engagement Center,' stripping away the explicit focus on international terrorism. Then, after Donald Trump's historic victory in 2016 but before he took office, GEC's mission was expanded to cover any and all 'foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.'"

That was a deliberate move, he charged.

"Obama's man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel, touted his efforts to protect 'democracy' while redefining it so that 'democracy' came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn't like. In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump's campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, 'Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.' That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about 'why America needs a hate speech law,'" Rubio charged.

America has paid a price for the leftist ideology.

That agenda created "the hoax that Russian interference, misinformation, and 'meddling' is what caused President Trump's victory in 2016, rather than a winning political message that only he was offering."

He added, "In 2020, a coronavirus from a Chinese lab swept the globe, and GEC popped up with a report warning that a 'Russian disinformation apparatus' was behind public speculation that the virus was an 'engineered bioweapon' or that it existed due to 'research conducted at the Wuhan institute.' GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users. It created lists of thousands of accounts that were accused of being foreign propaganda vectors simply for sharing articles or even following certain accounts. These lists were sent to social media companies for 'review,' but nobody was fooled — the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech."

Further, "GEC was an enthusiastic participant in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an infamous group established under constitutionally questionable conditions to monitor 'disinformation' about the 2020 election. The EIP pretty much exclusively singled out accounts and narratives associated with President Trump and his supporters and, in fact, directly flagged President Trump's tweets, along with his family members and friends of the administration," he said.

GEC even, "when it wasn't directly nagging social media companies to censor more, the GEC paid private actors to do it for them. With its multimillion-dollar budget, paid for by American taxpayers, GEC funneled grants to organizations around the world dedicated to pushing speech restrictions under the guise of fighting 'disinformation.'"

The former Florida senator confirmed he chose to publish his piece in the Federalist, because one group funded by taxpayers, the British Global Disinformation Index, "once produced a list of the top 10 'riskiest online news outlets' in a direct bid to drive off their ad revenue and put them out of business. Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right, and The Federalist was among them."

He cited another group getting State Department dollars, NewsGuard, "a company that rates the reliability of various websites, once again for the purposes of driving traffic and ad revenue away from those rated poorly."

"NewsGuard claims to be nonpartisan — but its board of advisers has included one Rick Stengel, the very man who built the Global Engagement Center, who says Donald Trump uses ISIS propaganda tactics, and who believes that propagandizing the American people is a good thing."

He said the Trump administration rejects propaganda, and the belief that information Americans get must be censored.

"The American people don't need an obscure agency to 'protect' them from lies by pressuring X to ban users or trying to put The Federalist out of business."

He explained one of his projects has been to "liberate American speech by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center."

It was "supposed to be dead already," he noted. But when Republicans in Congress ordered the end of its funding last year, "Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R-FIMI) office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration."
Not so, he said. "Whatever name it goes by, GEC is dead. It will not return."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'The administration's actions continue to disregard the fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation'

The ongoing battle between the Trump administration and the Associated Press is heating up again as the White House has reportedly decided to completely eliminate a press-pool slot specifically reserved for wire services covering the president's daily actions.

The Hill reports: "A source in the West Wing confirmed the changes to The Hill on Tuesday evening and said moving forward, the press pool will be made up of the following group: one print journalist who will serve as the 'print pooler' each day, one additional print journalist, a crew from one of the major television networks, a crew from a secondary television network or streaming service, one radio journalist, one 'new media' or independent journalist and four photojournalists."

In addition to AP, Reuters and Bloomberg are news wire services.
As WorldNetDaily reported last week, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore AP access to the Oval Office and other spaces after President Trump banned the news agency's reporters for their continued use of the previous Gulf of Mexico name for the Gulf of America.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ordered access for the AP into the Oval Office, Air Force One and other limited spaces when available to other members of the media pool.

"Under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists – be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere – it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints," McFadden wrote.

The Hill noted of the new protocol: "The White House official said eligible outlets will be chosen for the pool on a rotating basis, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will retain day-to-day discretion to determine composition of the pool.

"Wire-based outlets will be eligible for selection as part of the pool's daily print-journalist rotation as part of the shake-up, but they will no longer have a permanent slot in the group.
"The official said outlets will be eligible for participation in the pool, 'irrespective of the substantive viewpoint expressed by an outlet.'"
AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton said the wire service was "deeply disappointed" over the new restrictions.

"The wire services represent thousands of news organizations across the U.S. and the world over," she said. "Our coverage is used by local newspapers and television stations in all 50 states to inform their communities.

"The administration's actions continue to disregard the fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation. This is a grave disservice to the American people."
NBC correspondent and former White House Correspondents' Association President Kelly O'Donnell blasted the latest White House decision.
"Wire reporters are among the most knowledgeable and dedicated to the White House beat," she said on X.
"They are on duty every day of the year and anywhere in the world needed to cover a president. Their work is a key building block for other media's work. Wires fill a critical role in the public's understanding of government and important events."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Popular talk-show host also reveals 'shock' at Trump tariffs

Popular talk show host Tucker Carlson has revealed that even though he knew President Donald Trump, his proposals for tariffs on the world jolted him, and he's also talked about the details of his departure from Fox News.

He now has his own company and his interviews with a wide range of personalities, posted on social media, are incredibly popular.

He was interviewed by the Daily Signal, which has posted two videos on YouTube.

In the first, Carlson commented on the tariffs, which Trump has used to try to bring the world's trade into balance for the United States, which long has allowed other countries access to its markets while paying often steep prices for having its products in other markets.

Carlson said Trump is wanting to negotiate those charges.

"I mean, the question is: Who needs the other more? Does the U.S. need China more or China need the U.S.? I can't answer that," Carlson explained to the Daily Signal.

Trump's tariffs went into effect earlier this month, and then the president granted a 90-day pause for most nations while negotiations were under way. The White House has said 75 nations had approached the U.S. about making deals, and some of those agreements could be announced soon.

At the same time, Trump raised tariffs on Chinese products to 125%, which the Communist regime promptly matched for U.S goods.

"The deal has been for the past 30 years: We'll buy your underpriced consumer goods; you buy our overpriced debt. And you know, in some ways that's worked great. In other ways, it hasn't worked at all," Carlson said.

He said the initial tariff announcement from Trump was a "shock."

But he confirmed there needs to be at least some "disengagement" from China.

"You have to be able to build a jet engine exclusively in the United States and not rely on supply chains 10,000 miles long or on countries that are hostile to you. I mean, that's crazy. It's just basic stuff. And we have the resources to do that," he said.

"I got fired from Fox for saying things they didn't like. … That's all right, you know. It's not my company. I wasn't one of those people like, 'You can't fire me.' It's like, of course you can fire me!"

He said his working relationship with the network was that its officials couldn't give him instructions, and he was getting good ratings.

"'If you don't like what I say, you can take me off the air, but you're not going to control my show, just fire me.' … And that seemed like that had always been our deal," he said.

He said he could have retired at that point, to pursue his passions for trout fishing, bird hunting and carpentry, but he loves "talking to people. I like learning – that sounds like B.S., but it's actually fully sincere. And I love that more than I love money … ."

After 30 years in cable news, Carlson said: "I liked everyone I worked for, including the people who fired me."

This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
'The only thing agents should be armed with are calculators'

House Republicans have begun pushing a plan that would take guns and ammunition away from agents of the Internal Revenue Service.

Likely among the most feared agencies, those agents now have thousands of guns and tons of ammunition.

But a congressman has determined that, "The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators."

A Fox News report explains the plan, called the "Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act," would disarm the agents and their agency.

It would prohibit the commissioner of the IRS from using funds to buy, receive or store firearms and ammunition, and require the bureau to transfer the arms it already has to the administrator of General Services.

From there, they would go to auctions or sales to licensed dealers, the report said.

And taxpayers actually would benefit from the income from those sales.

The plan comes from U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., who was blunt in his assessment: "The IRS has consistently been weaponized against American citizens, targeted religious organizations, journalists, gun owners, and everyday Americans.

"Arming these agents does not make the American public safer. My legislation, the Why Does the IRS Need Guns Act, would disarm these agents, auction off their guns to Federal Firearms License Owners, and sell their ammunition to the public. The only thing IRS agents should be armed with are calculators."

Cosponsors included GOP Reps. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, Mary Miller of Illinois and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

Moore explained, on social media on Tax Day this year, "Tax Day is a great reminder that it's time for the IRS to stop wasting our taxpayer dollars stockpiling guns and ammo."