Amber Duke

The Washington Post issued a mammoth correction this week on a story about Donald Trump's search for election fraud. The paper had admitted that they misquoted the former president twice. WaPo’s botched story is a cautionary tale of what happens when political biases cloud reportage and a reminder of why public trust in the media is so low. The original story, which was reported in January and written by Amy Gardner, broke the news that Trump had a December phone call with Georgia's top election investigator about the 2020 presidential election results. The scoop was sourced to an 'individual briefed on the call', who claimed Trump urged the official to 'find the fraud' and promised she'd be a 'national hero' if she did so.

Former director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought is urging Republicans in Congress to jump ship from legislation that bills itself as the conservative answer to the Equality Act, according to a letter obtained by The Spectator.  ''It purports to be a compromise amidst the culture wars, but it concedes far too much,' Vought, now the president of the Center for American Restoration and its advocacy arm, American Restoration Action, writes. The Fairness for All Act, introduced by Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah, makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity but carves out exemptions for religious institutions. It is meant to find a middle ground between the Democrat-led Equality Act and the conservatives who oppose that bill.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most important cases for voting rights in decades. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee centers on two Arizona measures aimed at voter integrity. The first prevents individuals from casting their ballot in the wrong precinct and the second prohibits ballot harvesting. The question at stake is whether these measures and others like them violate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election rules from disenfranchising minorities. The DNC's lawyers seem to argue that any election safeguard measure is discriminatory. If Biden thinks people of color don't know how to use the internet, then the DNC thinks they can't follow election laws.

Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's congressional tenure seemed doomed to fail before it began. Democrats and nearly a dozen Republicans voted to strip her of committee assignments because of her past social media posts engaging in conspiracy theories. She's been widely dismissed as a toxic figure. Greene, however, tells The Spectator that losing her committee seats only spurred her on to learn new ways of being influential in Congress. 'I found out you can do a lot of things on the House floor. And so thankfully my staff, my [legislative director] and I, we got to work and learned floor procedure...pretty quickly,' Greene said during an interview Tuesday. 'I love a challenge.' This education came in handy this week. Rep.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is finally getting his comeuppance. Oddly, however, it’s not for killing thousands of nursing home residents. Instead, the press has decided that the real story is Cuomo being slightly creepy toward to young women. Cuomo's comments to two former aides are icky, no doubt. However, the media has also piled on with other spurious accusations that they insist are proof of a pattern of abusive behavior. In one, a young woman says Cuomo touched the small of her back at a wedding and then grabbed her face and asked if he could kiss her. She is visibly uncomfortable in a photo of the incident, but what attractive woman hasn't had a weird old dude make a poorly strategized advance at an event with alcohol?

Immigration, a top issue before and during the Trump presidency, has become much less of a concern for Americans over the past year due to the primacy of the pandemic and the ensuing economic shutdown. That, combined with the press's lackadaisical approach to covering the Biden administration, means there hasn't been enough media scrutiny of Biden's incoherent border policy. Frequently the Biden administration's words do not match its actions, primarily because it does not seem to understand that policies have real-world consequences. For example, after Biden campaigned on loosening Trump's stricter enforcement of immigration law, thousands of Honduran migrants formed a caravan to come to the US in hopes of gaining entry. The Biden team tried to put the genie back in the bottle.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was outfoxed by the House impeachment managers on Saturday as they moved to allow witnesses in the impeachment trial for former president Donald Trump. Many Senate Democrats signaled this week that they did not think that witnesses were necessary to convict Trump. The introduction of witnesses would also extend the length of the trial, providing poor optics of Democratic priorities in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. However, impeachment managers are seeking the testimony of those with potential insight into Trump’s mindset and conversations around the time of the Capitol riot, such as Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger to attention. The second-term congresswoman was the second most talked-about politician in 2019, just behind then-President Donald Trump. AOC loves to frequently jump on livestream videos to talk directly to her fans and voters, whether while she's making macaroni, building furniture, or playing a wildly popular multiplayer game. It was during one of these Instagram livestreams on Monday night that she committed perhaps her gravest sin yet as a politician.

What’s the worth of the 'word as a Biden'? President Joe Biden seems sure that his family name is as good as gold. He repeatedly tells the American people that they should trust him because, well, he’s a Biden! ‘I give you my word as a Biden: When I'm president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth,’ Biden tweeted back in March 2020. He used the line again after taking office, tweeting, ‘I gave you my word as a Biden — and I kept that word.’ But what’s the actual value of a Biden word? The American people still haven’t received an additional $1,400 to bring the total of their recent stimulus check to $2,000.

If you thought the thinly sourced stories from anonymous 'administration officials' would end once Trump left office, think again: CNN is now indistinguishable from President Biden's press shop. The new administration sought to plant a story that preemptively blamed former president Donald Trump for any hiccups in its COVID-19 vaccine distribution program, and it found the perfect patsy in CNN reporter MJ Lee. Anonymous Biden administration officials claimed to Lee that the Trump administration had no plan for actually distributing the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines it worked so quickly to approve through the FDA. 'There is nothing for us to rework.

After months of speculation, we finally know what a Joe Biden presidency will look like. The newly inaugurated 46th President of the United States released a list of executive actions he intends to take on his first day in office. Biden's governance will not be about centrism or socialism, but about corporatism and globalism. Gone are the days of Trump's 'America First' policy. 'America Last' Biden has taken the reins. During his inaugural address, Biden delivered a message to those 'beyond our borders'. 'We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,' he promised. What he meant is that the United States will return to a global order that has failed to provide tangible benefit for Americans.

In January of 2017, the news outlet I was working for at the time asked me to go to downtown DC and cover the protests during President Trump's inauguration ceremony. #DisruptJ20, an activist group with ties to the violent left-wing group antifa, was planning 'bold mobilization' and 'widespread civil resistance' during the event. What I saw there was horrifying. Rioters dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing bandanas over their faces smashed storefronts, set fires, harassed and threatened Trump supporters and attacked police officers. I watched from about 10 yards away as one antifa member grabbed a metal pole off the ground and swung it at a cop, who responded by pepper-spraying the area. Over 200 people were arrested that day.

If the people who stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC on Wednesday accomplished one thing, it’s that they effectively killed any legitimate inquiry into voter fraud. Spurred by concerns over in-person voting during the pandemic, Democrats successfully changed local and state voting rules at the last minute and pivoted to allowing the bulk of voting to be done via mail. Any major change to the voting system in such a short period of time deserves a full and comprehensive audit, even if the outcome does not change upon its completion. However, because some pro-Trump demonstrators resorted to violence in order to have their concerns heard, politicians will refuse to ever again discuss any voting irregularities.

Is this the death of mainstream Trumpism? Trump supporters left a peaceful rally near the White House on Wednesday afternoon and marched on the Capitol, clashing with police officers, toppling barriers and climbing walls to storm the building. Capitol police deployed tear gas against the rioters, buildings were evacuated and members were encouraged to use gas masks in their offices. At the time of writing, the National Guard was on its way to the Capitol to quell the protest. The quick turn from a happy warrior march to an aggressive and violent attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election results was ultimately the culmination of a sad trend in society. The left weaponized violent protests all summer in response to police brutality.