NEWSOM vs. DESANTIS
For Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a much-anticipated Fox News debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom was more of a marathon than a sprint.
Although he started out sounding nervous, by midway through the 90-minute election season extravaganza, DeSantis had found his footing.
The Florida governor brought visual aids to help with his argumentation. In defending his Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay bill,” DeSantis showed a copy of a page from a children’s book showing examples of explicit sexual acts, partly censored for the TV audience.
He also showed a blotted map of San Francisco that he said marked sites where human feces was reported.
“But they cleaned it up when a communist dictator came to town,” DeSantis said, referring to he Chinese Communist Party leader’s visit to the city as part of the G20 summit.
Newsom, meanwhile, started out smooth and confident. But at times, the California state executive’s confidence appeared to lapse. Flashes of anger—for example, while quoting Parkland parent Fred Guttenberg—left Newsom off balance.
And, while Newsom claimed Guttenberg called DeSantis “weak, pathetic, and small” for signing a concealed carry bill behind closed doors, Guttenberg actually used the words “weak, pathetic,” and “small-minded.”
It was not the only time California’s governor smoothly fumbled or finessed quotations and facts.
Early in the debate, Newsom claimed that over the last two years, there were “more Floridians going to California than Californians going to Florida.”
On X, Phil Kerpen and other analysts swiftly pointed out that U.S. Census data told another story.
Thankfully for Newsom, fact-checkers had his back. Politifact rated his statement “mostly accurate,” citing a June 2023 fact check that included the words “per capita” (in the debate cross-talk, it’s possible Newsom said “per capita” too, but if he did, it wasn’t obvious.)
On the whole, though, Newsom’s latest appearance on Fox News with Sean Hannity, this time as a low-key moderator rather than an interlocutor, could leave him looking like the braver man.
After all, just as legacy outlets are not always friendly to conservative Republicans, Fox News isn’t the most hospitable environment for liberal Democrats.
And Hannity’s fact-driven questions, which highlighted statistics on everything from crime to COVID-19, weren’t stacked in Neswsom’s favor.
What’s more, as a stated defender of both his own state and President Joe Biden, the California governor could capitalize on the Florida governor’s most obvious vulnerability: his flagging campaign for the presidency.
He accused Desantis of using migrant policy to try to “out-Trump Trump.”
“And by the way, how’s that going for you, Ron?” he asked, pointing out that DeSantis’s poll numbers in the 2024 Republican contest pale beside former President Donald J. Trump’s even in Florida.
That leads to the big question: did DeSantis’s performance give his campaign more runway?
After the debate, DeSantis said his appearance in the debate made sense in a race “where one candidate gets a disproportionate amount of media coverage.”
Time will tell if the Hannity-hosted debate has given DeSantis an edge on that unnamed “one candidate”—presumably Trump (who else could it be?)
—Nathan Worcester
DEMAND FOR UFO TRANSPARENCY
Lawmakers are demanding greater transparency from the U.S. national defense sector amid increased sightings of what is commonly called unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by pilots.
In recent years UFOs, re-dubbed “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs), have come to the forefront of public attention in the wake of publicly released videos depicting unknown aircraft performing feats that seem to break the laws of known physics.
But members of Congress say that in trying to learn more about these UAPs—whether they be of U.S., Chinese, or extraterrestrial origin—they’ve been consistently stonewalled by the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense (DOD).
Now, a bipartisan cohort of lawmakers has come forward in support of Rep. Tim Burchett’s (R-Tenn.) amendment providing for increased transparency and public disclosures about UAPs where consistent with broader national security aims.
The text of the amendment is included in this year’s House draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a must-pass bill.
It would require that within 180 days from the passage of the legislation Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the DOD “declassify any Department of Defense documents relating to publicly known sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena” so long as these records “do not reveal sources, methods, or otherwise compromise the national security of the United States.”
Until recently, belief in UAPs was considered fringe.
In recent years, however, the U.S. government itself has acknowledged the existence of UAPs, publicly releasing several pieces of footage caught by military aircraft displaying UAPs.
For decades, UAPs have been spotted over U.S. military bases, harassing U.S. military aircraft, and, most concerning, over U.S. nuclear weapons facilities.
However, questions linger about the true source of these odd spacecraft: some believe they are advanced alien spacecraft, while others question whether they have a more terrestrial origin in China or another U.S. adversary.
During a highly-anticipated hearing in July, former Pentagon officials made stunning claims under oath, saying that the Pentagon had been tracking UAPs for decades and had even recovered non-human “biologics” from the wreckage of crashed UAPs.
But lawmakers say that as they’ve tried to get more info on these unknown aircraft, they’ve faced “stonewalling” and “rampant over-classification” on receiving the information.
Transparency about these UAPs, lawmakers emphasized, is their main goal.
“In my short time in office, it has become very clear and evident that there is an apparent attempt to an orchestrated attempt to deny this access and it appears that that is coming from the intelligence community,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in support of Burchett’s amendment.
“It is unacceptable that any mid-level unelected bureaucrat staffers can tell members of Congress that we are not allowed to access information about UAPs,” Luna said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) called the amendment “a beachhead for us to be able to get the answers and to be able to demand the transparency that is necessary.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (R-Fla.), the sole Democrat who took part in the press conference, also dismissed the idea that UAP speculation was “nonsense.”
“The pushback we got is what interests me,“ Moskowitz said. ”Every time we pull the thread, and we stumbled on something, it seemed that we would get stonewalled.
“If this is all nonsense, right, then why are we seeing constant—from different areas of government—whistleblowers coming out with things that are credible? Why as legislators are we being stonewalled?”
Lawmakers demurred, however, from speculating on whether the UAPs had their origin among “little green men” in the deep reaches of outer space or if they represent a new threat from one of the United States’ terrestrial adversaries like China.
Because they’ve been blocked from looking deeper into the matter, they said, they just don’t have enough information to make that judgment either way.
They hope that with the successful adoption of Burchett’s measure, that’ll change.
WILL AMERICANS SKIP MEAT TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE?
If the United Nations told Americans to eat less meat, would they? Not likely.
During the COP28 summit, developed nations will likely be told by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization they need to cut back on meat consumption to help fight climate change.
COP28 is centered on finding ways to limit temperature the global temperature rise to 1.5°C, as required by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Frank Mitloehner, director of the Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research Center at the University of California, Davis, told The Epoch Times, that if the FAO does recommend people eat less meat, it won’t make a difference in their diets.
“People will (not) eat less ... because there are a couple of ivory tower people thinking that this is the way it should be,“ Mitloehner said. ”It’s not going to happen.”
In 2017, researchers estimated what the climate impact would be if everyone in the U.S. adopted a vegan lifestyle. The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that if the American livestock and poultry industries ceased to exist, overall greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. would drop by 2.6 percent.
That’s a notable reduction, but it will not help meet the U.N.’s stated climate goals, Mitloehner said.
Ethan Lane, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association vice president of government affairs, said the U.S. beef cattle herd’s methane emissions account for less than 0.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“America’s beef producers and consumers around the globe deserve real solutions to the climate issue, not artificial barriers to protein consumption that will do nothing to solve the world’s climate issues,” Lane said.
—Austin Alonzo
WHAT’S HAPPENING
- Vice President Kamala Harris departs for Dubai to attend COP28, a global climate conference. President Joe Biden will not attend this year.
- Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) faces an expulsion vote by the House of Representatives.
- In the Georgia election case against former President Donald Trump, a judge has set two hearings today. In the morning, the court will review motions challenging the indictment from Trump and other defendants. Later, it will focus on motions on pretrial deadline by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.
BOOKMARKS
A new lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that Pfizer misrepresented the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine. The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reported on the lawsuit, in which the state of Texas is seeking damages of as much as $10 million from the pharmaceutical giant.
As part of Senate Democrats’ ongoing crusade against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Senate Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and conservative activist Leonard Leo. The Epoch Times’ Matthew Vadum reports on the subpoena and Republicans’ reaction to it.
Does politics boil down to rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies? More and more American conservatives accuse the Biden administration of doing just that, including through the shadowy “SSSS” watchlist for certain airline passengers.
Revolver.news explains that investigative journalist James O’Keefe dug into the category after he started seeing “SSSS” on his domestic boarding passes. According to O’Keefe, a Homeland Security employee told him that Jan. 6 has led to the politicization of the category.
Commentator Lauren Witzke wrote that she wound up with the dreaded “quad S” designation after her Senate run in 2020. She claimed the FBI refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request inquiring into her placement on the list.
“It’s safe to say we’ve reached an extremely dangerous point in America,” she posted on X.
The Epoch Times’ Joseph Lord was on the SSSS story earlier this year. He reported on the case of Terry Newsome, a Chicago-area father who found himself on “the list” in late 2022 after he objected to pornographic material in his children’s library–and after being in Washington on Jan. 6. Newsome’s FOIA request to the FBI was also rebuffed.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) wrote to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year seeking answers about Newsome and similar cases.
The Epoch Times’ Jeff Carlson details a little-noticed move in the last days of the Obama administration before Trump took over in a presidency plagued by intelligence leaks. The change to Executive Order 12333 made it easier for individuals to get their hands on data from the National Security Agency (NSA) while also keeping information away from the White House.
Carlson questions why the change wasn’t enacted earlier in 2016, as previous reporting from The New York Times had suggested might occur. The upshot: “If this new provision had been implemented in early 2016 as originally scheduled, dissemination of any raw intelligence on or relating to the Trump campaign to officials within the Obama White House would likely have been made more difficult or quite possibly prohibited.”
The New York Times reports on the status of Germany’s military more than a year and a half after Russia invaded Ukraine. As it turns out, rearming a rump state of the post-Cold War liberal order is harder than it sounds, thanks in part to a sluggish defense bureaucracy and the country’s military aid to Ukraine.
And on Substack, Christian commentator Aaron Renn assesses the differences between Trump and Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador known for his crackdown on gangs in the country. Bukele, he argues, has marketed himself as a “builder” of big public projects.
“What US populist in recent times has ever built anything?” Renn asks.
