Left-wing Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed endorsed “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons” and said locking up criminals was akin to “robbing” them of their freedom. His comments came during a webinar hosted by a prison abolition group where he appeared alongside a convicted murderer and registered sex offender, the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross reports.
El-Sayed was the featured guest at an August 2020 webinar hosted by the Carceral State Project and American Friends Service Committee to discuss their report, “I Don’t Want to Die in Prison.” The committee advertised the event—using the hashtags #FreeThemAll and #AbolishPrison—as a platform to “discuss the report findings and the road to decarceration and abolition with Abdul El-Sayed.”
El-Sayed, who is leading the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, thanked the groups for “hosting such a critical conversation” before endorsing “decarceration,” the mass release of prisoners. “Not only are we taking people’s rights from them but also we have failed to provide them the basic means of a dignified life,” he said. “Every choice we make about incarcerating somebody is about robbing that somebody from the people who love them and the people who need them.”
“While El-Sayed’s message may not hurt his standing with Democratic voters, it could prove a political liability in November’s general election for the open seat, which is considered a toss-up,” Ross writes. “Republicans have cast El-Sayed, who ran for Michigan governor in 2018, as ‘dangerous’ and ‘extreme,’ citing his dalliance with socialists like Hasan Piker, the left-wing influencer who said that ‘America deserved 9/11’ and that Israel is ‘much worse’ than Hamas. El-Sayed campaigned with Amir Makled, a candidate for the University of Michigan Board of Regents who called slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a ‘martyr.’”
The media ratings firm NewsGuard, whose business is doling out reliability ratings for media organizations—you’ll never guess its biases—has launched a chatbot that it’s marketing as a “personal fact-checker.” It suggests there are between 72 and “infinite” genders and makes basic errors about names and dates, the Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reports. The Atlantic and Snopes are endorsing the chatbot, which only consults sources NewsGuard deems reliable, as a nuanced aggregator. A Free Beacon review indicates otherwise.
“The bot regurgitates left-wing talking points, cites predominantly liberal news outlets, and omits moderate or conservative sources—including those highly rated by NewsGuard—that offer an alternative point of view,” writes Sibarium. Asked “how many sexes are there,” for example, NewsGuard AI argued that the “traditional two-sex framework” is “overly simplistic,” pointing to an essay from a gender studies professor in the Huffington Post to do so. The bot also cites a “MedicineNet” article that “lists 72 gender identities beyond male and female, defining gender identity as how a person identifies ‘regardless of their anatomy or genetics.’”
“The answers provide a preview of how NewsGuard’s pivot to AI could affect the sources chatbots cite and the claims they treat as respectable, encoding the biases of fact checkers into a supposedly neutral technology,” Sibarium notes. “Some of its answers are significantly less balanced than those produced by other AI chatbots, including Claude and ChatGPT, which have a documented liberal bias.”
READ MORE: A Media Watchdog Released An AI ‘Fact-Checker.’ It Says There May Be 72 Genders.
The Biden administration’s special envoy for “LGBTQI+ Persons,” gender activist Jessica Stern, had a mandate to put gay and transgender issues “into everything we do” in American diplomacy, according to internal emails obtained exclusively by our Adam Kredo. The materials show how far the administration went to impose fringe gender views on American diplomats and allied countries across the globe.
Stern was the second ever “U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+) Persons,” a role created by the Obama administration, which entailed “the hard work of integrating LGBTQI rights into everything we do” at the State Department, as Stern put it in one email. Stern, for example, trumpeted the State Department’s introduction of passports that allowed an “X” gender marker in addition to the biologically correct male and female options, saying during a conference call about the issue in 2022: “People do not always fit within a male or a female designation.”
But Stern was not content with confining this lunacy to the United States In a 2022 speech delivered remotely to a Taiwanese government-sponsored event in Taipei, she urged Taiwan to permit “an option for a third gender marker on legal identity documents,” adding, “Trans women are women, trans men are men.” Good thing the Taiwanese don’t have anything more important to worry about.
Stern also attempted to target Germany as a partner in pushing Biden’s “inclusive democracy” on smaller countries. After making an official visit to Germany in 2022 to speak on a “German Federal Government Commissioner for the Acceptance of Sexual and Gender Diversity,” her office asked the State Department for permission to deliver a special presentation before the German parliament on “the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.” The staffer who made the request described Germany as “our number one priority country in terms of supporting an increase of development assistance and political contributions to LGBTQI+ rights internationally.”
Elsewhere:
Yale is looking to settle a federal investigation with the Trump administration, the New York Times reports, after the administration accused the medical school of discriminating against white and Asian applicants.
Move over, Zohran. If you want to know which way the winds are blowing in the Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom called for a tax hike “on billionaires and those with a net worth of $100 million”—not just in California, where billionaires are already fleeing a proposed wealth tax, but “in America” writ large.
Speaking of prospective Democratic presidential candidates, a NOTUS report reveals that Democrats are bracing for a “clusterfuck” of a primary in 2028 that “could traumatize the party” thanks to “a large field without a clear frontrunner,” “a weakened DNC,” and an angry base that’s “demanding generational change and showing a growing hostility to Israel.” Good luck to all!
A headline from Politico—not the Onion or Babylon Bee—reads “Democrats grapple uncomfortably with World Cup success.” The Trump-obsessed Democrats, you see, had “criticized President Donald Trump’s role in preparations” for the tournament, arguing that because Trump was involved in bringing it to the United States and is in charge of the country now, it would “maybe be a disaster.” Instead, it’s been “logistically smooth,” which Politico says “poses a problem for Trump’s critics.” Seek help.
The channel formerly known as MSNBC is cutting live weekend programming after 6 p.m. and replacing it with pre-taped video podcasts in an obvious cost-cutting measure, according to Variety. It’s bad news for the hosts of MS NOW’s The Weekend: Primetime show, which launched last May and will now be canceled. The hosts include Hamas apologist Ayman Mohyeldin and Doug Emhoff enthusiast Catherine Rampell.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology failed to produce a report on campus antisemitism in the wake of October 7, so a Jewish MIT professor, Yossi Sheffi, wrote a book on the topic for them. Now that it’s about to be published, “Dr. Sheffi says M.I.T. administrators are trying to minimize its impact by denying him access to money to promote the book,” the New York Times reported. “I think they are embarrassed by what will come out in the book and worried the Trump administration will use it to cut research funding to M.I.T.,” he said. One can only hope.
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I mean the DNC cray-cray just keeps coming.
May be time to refresh the tree of liberty?