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The quiet significance of the January 6 hearings The unexpected star of the fourth public hearing of the House January 6 Committee was a rock-ribbed conservative most Americans have never heard of. Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers found himself before the committee, and the cameras, in Washington yesterday because of a series of calls he received from the Trump team after the 2020 election. Bowers campaigned for Trump, but unlike the former president and his team, acknowledged that his side lost the 2020 election. In yesterday’s hearing he testified that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others pressured him to back a slate of rogue electors and subvert the will of Arizona voters.

Mike Pence began his political career as "Rush Limbaugh on decaf," a calmer and more collegial kind of conservative radio host based in Indianapolis. He likely ended it as Donald Trump's patsy, running for his life from star-spangled sans culottes who wanted to hang him for refusing to certify his own ticket as the winner of an election. And...I mean...geez. We've all ridden some emotional rollercoasters over these last six years, but Pence's is in a category all its own. I think a letdown that severe would have sent me careening up to some remote corner of New Hampshire to live out my days in a lean-to. And that's not even counting all the White House drama Pence no doubt had to endure while in office.

Over the last four months, the Biden administration has assured us that it is only sending “defensive weapons” to Ukraine. It's a claim that's become more difficult to believe as more sophisticated systems are announced seemingly every week that do not require further congressional approval. Take the most recent example. The White House announced a fresh $1 billion last week for 18 more Howitzers, more long-range missiles for the HIMARS rocket systems announced earlier this month, and a new weapon, Harpoon anti-ship missiles. These are systems that can strike at the more than 20 Russian naval vessels accused of blockading Ukraine’s eastern ports.

Joe Biden promised on the campaign trail in 2020 that he would "transition away from the oil industry,” convert to 100 percent "clean" energy by 2035, and "end fossil fuels.” Shortly after taking office, he started to make good on this pledge by suspending all new gas and oil leases on federal property and ending the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, faced with gas prices at a record high $5 per gallon and runaway inflation — aka the consequences of his own actions — Biden is looking for an off-ramp. Somehow, the Biden administration has decided it can still convince oil companies to ramp up domestic production in the short term while simultaneously promising to adhere to the president’s ambitious climate change goals in the long term.

Move over baby formula: there’s a new shortage in town. Tampons are becoming increasingly hard to find in Joe Biden’s America. Much as they did with the formula shortage, I’m sure the president’s handlers will wait a few weeks before briefing Joe on the tampon issue. After all, they wouldn’t want to upset their boss with more bad news while he is trying to enjoy his weekly weekend trip to his mansion on Rehoboth Beach. (He left at 11 a.m. on Friday, by the way.) Unfortunately for the White House, the media are not ignoring the problem. NPR ran a piece this week titled, “It’s not just you: tampons are harder to find — and pricier.

This article was originally published on Ann Coulter’s Substack, which you can sign up to receive here. As much as I'm enjoying the January 6 Committee's careful assembly of evidence proving former president Trump is a douchebag, I wasn't seeing much in the way of a criminal offense until this week's underreported story about how Trump used his "STOP THE STEAL" fundraising appeals to grift his supporters out of $250 million, none of which was, in fact, used to fight election fraud. It didn't even go to the poor saps who got themselves arrested at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Instead, the $250 million seems to have been funneled exclusively to Trump businesses, family and friends.

Recent mass shootings have reminded us of just how much gun violence has surged since Covid. The record of 45,222 Americans dying from gun-related injuries in the first year of the pandemic could well be topped in 2022, with more than 12,000 fatally shot since the end of April. Many rightly condemn progressive district attorneys in cities for failing to condemn the increased bloodshed. Yet the uptick in violence has been uniform across the nation, plaguing rural counties as much as urban ones, which is why most psychological experts put the blame squarely on the emotional residue of lengthy Covid lockdowns.

Last year, someone inside the Biden administration had a bright idea: let’s tweet about food prices on the Fourth of July! The staffer surely scanned an American Farm Bureau news release, and thought, wait until people hear they’ll save a whole 16 cents on their cookouts compared to last year! The staffer no doubt ran this brain wave by his higher-ups, who agreed. We'll even do a GIF that people can readily retweet! To quote the last administration, it’ll be YUUUUUUUGE! Of course, the graphic may have been tweaked slightly before it was sent out. Otherwise everyone might have noticed that prices were up on hamburger buns (6 percent), chocolate chip cookies (11 percent), and strawberries (22 percent!).

There’s a new federal gun law in the works and it's being heralded as a “bipartisan breakthrough agreement on gun violence.” I can’t even get past the first sentence without issuing an objection, your honor! Because the proposed gun control package is just more manipulative language aimed at eroding Second Amendment rights. “Gun violence” makes it sound as if the guns are the ones causing the violence. The same goes for “gun safety” — a term President Biden used in response to this proposed legislation, which will not make guns any safer or less violent. Guns are inanimate objects, neither violent nor safe. They don’t spontaneously combust. People do.

Soaring gasoline prices (they’re up 49 percent since President Biden took office) are due to “Putin’s price hikes,” claims Biden. But last I checked, Putin wasn’t stateside canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, pursuing efforts to end federal oil and gas leasing programs, and careening our country toward more Covid-like lockdowns, social isolation, supply chain shortages, and another summer crime wave. A brief recap of Biden’s oil and gastastrophe: in January 2021, during his first days in office, the president revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit and issued an executive order that, in his own typically eloquent words, directed the “Secretary of the Interior to stop issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offsh- — and offshore waters, wherever possible.

Conservative media seems to have missed this story, and the limited liberal press it got took it as a simple win. But the real showdown is coming this fall. Later this year, it is possible — not likely, but possible — that the Supreme Court will take away the right of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. This would have the effect of granting some level of First Amendment protection, now unavailable, to conservative users of those platforms. The potential for change hinges on a law struck down by the lower courts, Netchoice v. Paxton, which challenges Texas law HB 20. That law addresses social media companies with more than 50 million active users in the US, like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right. It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.