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The Top 10 Non-Stories of 2024

January 1, 2025

Christians take fulfilling their civic duties seriously, but acting as conscientious citizens requires wisdom and knowledge. We gain wisdom from the Bible, but all too often, we fail to gain knowledge from the news media. In the place of accurate information, the aggressively secularist legacy media serves up mounds of narrative spun into gossamer-thin premises suffused with liberal “context.” Instead of “news stories,” the media offer Americans “non-stories” designed to manipulate the populace into pliantly adopting left-wing policies.

These were the top 10 non-stories of 2024.

1. Women Dying from ‘Abortion Bans’/Pro-Life Laws Ban ‘Miscarriage Care’

This summer, Vice President Kamala Harris hoped exploiting the deaths of two women from incomplete abortions would breathe life into her presidential campaign. While it could not revive her electoral fortunes, it resuscitated the abortion industry’s founding lie: that pro-life laws kill, while abortion saves lives.

On September 16, the Soros-funded news outlet ProPublica broke the story of 28-year-old Amber Thurman’s death, followed two days later by the story of 41-year-old Candi Miller. Both women had undergone a chemical abortion, taking the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, and both lived in Georgia, which protects life from the moment doctors can detect a fetal heartbeat, approximately six weeks. That was enough for the abortion industry to make a blood libel against the pro-life movement.

“We know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” fibbed Harris during a campaign stop in late September. She led the crowd in chanting “Amber Nicole Thurman,” claiming, “Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed.”

In fact, both women died from two side effects of the abortion industry: incomplete abortion from mifepristone that led to sepsis and misinformation from the abortion lobby that led to confusion and death. Although chemical abortion often leaves part of the child’s fetal tissue inside the mother’s womb, the abortion industry hands out potentially fatal pills and abandons women to their fate, typically without a follow-up. Thurman developed sepsis, and a hospital in Georgia — perhaps believing pro-abortion misinformation that removing her fetal remains through a dilation and curettage procedure would violate state law — turned her away. She began vomiting blood and died from the abortion pill’s complications on August 19, 2022.

Miller developed complications from an incomplete abortion, suffered excruciating pain for days, and died on November 12, 2022, with her three-year-old daughter by her side. She explicitly believed the abortion industry’s disinformation. “Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor ‘due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions,’” reported ProPublica.

The clearest analysis would pin the blame on the abortion industry. The legacy media immediately parroted the Democrats’ spin that conservative Christians killed innocent women. MSNBC predictably rolled out a news story charging, “How Georgia’s LIFE Act killed Amber Thurman,” but widely read news sources did so as well. “Two Georgia deaths are tied to abortion restrictions. Experts say abortion pills they took are safe,” claimed the Associated Press. “Georgia’s abortion ban linked to Amber Thurman’s death in ProPublica investigation,” stated USA Today. “Amber Thurman was killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. There will be others,” assured The Guardian.

In fact, not a single pro-life state outlaws miscarriage care or forces women to be near death before providing treatment. This is in part due to the obvious fact that treating a miscarriage does not take a human life; it saves one, unlike abortion. To dispel all confusion, Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked lawyer Heather Hacker under oath:

Lankford: Ms. Hacker, just to clarify on this, are there any states where women face prosecution for having an abortion? 

Hacker: No. 

Lankford: Are there any states that criminalize miscarriage? 

Hacker: No. 

Lankford: Or the care for any for a miscarriage? 

Hacker: No. 

Lankford: Are there any states that criminalize removing an ectopic pregnancy? 

Hacker: No. 

Lankford: Are there any states that prohibit lifesaving care for the mother? 

Hacker: No. 

Lankford: Are there any states where women have to be actively dying for a doctor to be able to act for her care? 

Hacker: No. 

Republican governors sought to dispel the confusion engendered by the abortion industry’s misinformation. Florida, under pro-life Governor Ron DeSantis (R), sent a guidance to doctors on September 19 clarifying, “a miscarriage is not an abortion.” (Emphasis in original.) The “Notice to Health Care Providers Regarding Misinformation About Abortions in Florida” also noted, under Section 390.011(1) of state law, doctors may carry out a procedure in which an unborn child will lose its life if it is necessary “at any point in pregnancy to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” (Emphasis in original.) Yet the misinformation persists.

The abortion-media complex’s campaign to transfer its guilt in two women’s deaths to the pro-life movement constitutes the greatest act of moral Judo in 2024. But its falsehood merely renewed a longstanding abortion tactic. Back-alley abortionists cited their own victims’ deaths to legalize abortion in the 1960s and 1970s. The late Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist who founded the group then known as NARAL (now rebranded as “Reproductive Freedom for All”) came clean after he became pro-life and converted to Catholicism. Dr. Nathanson admitted the abortion industry lied when it claimed to have data that supported a figure of five thousand” women dying every year from illegal abortions. The actual number of women who died from illegal abortion in 1972 was 39 — while 24 women died from “safe and legal” abortion that year. The same back-alley abortionists who maimed and killed women before Roe v. Wade continued to do so after legalization.

Curiously, the abortion industry — which insisted women would die from carrying out their own abortions — immediately encouraged women in pro-life states to stock up on mifepristone and engage in self-managed abortions, often alone on the toilet. The abortion pill has claimed the lives of 26 women and had more than 4,000 documented adverse effects when administered legally.

Of all the overreported stories of 2024, this may be the most toxic, because it is not only false, it is the opposite of the truth. The abortion industry’s abortion-and-abandonment business model will create many more Amber Thurmans and Candi Millers.

2. Kamala Harris Wins Iowa

Just three days before the 2024 election, the Kamala Harris campaign got a massive psychological boost, as a new poll purported to show Harris winning the blood-red state of Iowa by three points. “Iowa Poll: Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day. Here’s how,” reported the Des Moines Register on November 2.

“She has clearly leaped into a leading position,” pollster J. Ann Selzer informed the paper. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming.” Selzer accurately predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 and nearly predicted his share of the state’s vote in 2020.

The poll’s specifics were more shocking: Kamala Harris’s greatest support came from senior citizens, those over the age of 65. Older women supported Harris “by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.” (The story also highlighted an 18-year-old woman who “likes Harris’ stance on abortion rights.”)

For Republicans, the report immediately seemed fishy. Donald Trump won Iowa by six points in 2016 and eight points in 2020. Neither party bothered campaigning in the state in 2024. For Democrats, it seemed the Kamala Harris campaign — which overpromised it would fill liberals with “joy” — may have finally delivered. And credulous readers read the report as proof that the 2024 presidential race remained up for grabs.

The legacy media immediately cited the poll as proof of a Kamala Harris surge. “New polling shows the candidates are still locked in an extremely tight race amid signs that late-deciding persuadable voters are breaking towards Harris,” claimed CNN’s Dana Bash. “Experts widely see that poll as reputable,” said Dasha Burns on “Meet the Press” that Sunday. “Even if Ms. Harris doesn’t win in Iowa, which has only six electoral votes, the idea that she may be making gains in a Midwestern state could give Democrats hope for her chances in battleground states like Wisconsin and Michigan,” reported a hopeful New York Times. Phil Boas of The Arizona Republic said the poll showed, “Abortion may have changed Iowa’s poll results.”

Then came election day, when the Kamala Harris surge went the way of the Walter Mondale surge and the Michael Dukakis surge. Trump crushed Harris in Iowa by a 12-point margin, 56% to 42.7%. The president’s greatest margin of victory came among women and older voters, according to ABC News exit polls (which had issues of their own).

The results exposed Selzer’s poll as “probably the most ridiculous thing that ever happened in the industry,” said Mark Mitchell, chief pollster for Rasmussen Reports. When Selzer released the poll “on the weekend before election day, just to satiate the Democrat need for some kind of good news … she burned her credibility,” Mitchell told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” at the time.

With Trump’s Iowa landslide, Selzer’s poll seems either a sudden outburst of incompetence or election interference. In a November 17 post on Truth Social, President-elect Trump dismissed the survey as a “totally [f]ake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing.” A month later, he sued Selzer, her polling firm, and the Des Moines Register for publishing “election-interfering fiction.”

“I’m mystified about what motivation anyone thinks I had to act unethically in such a public poll,” Selzer told local public media. By shifting questions to her motives (which, like most people’s, are typically manifold and inscrutable), she seemingly concedes any substantive defense of her work.

If Selzer is guilty of using polls to manipulate the electorate, she’s far from alone. ABC News and NBC News gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead in the popular vote, and CBS News showed the two candidates tied near election day. In the end, Trump beat Harris by two million votes.

The Harris-Walz campaign apparently profited handsomely from such deception. David Plouffe, a senior adviser on the Harris campaign who has close ties to Barack Obama, admitted the campaign’s internal polls never showed Harris leading President Trump nationally. “We were behind” the entire race, he told the November 26 episode of the blasphemously named “Pod Save America” podcast. “[T]here was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” Plouffe confessed.

Despite knowing the campaign faced certain defeat, the Harris-Walz campaign spent a near-record $1.5 billion and ended the season $20 million in debt. Her campaign continued sending fundraising solicitations to its donors into December, although filings with the Federal Election Commission show the campaign still has $1.8 million on hand.

Kamala Harris’s campaign finances prove Iowa isn’t the only place where the numbers don’t add up.

3. Joe Biden’s Sudden Mental Decline

After Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate against Donald Trump, the legacy media began admitting the undeniable truth: Joe Biden’s mental acuity had slipped. Yet they couched these stories as though the decline had only just begun.

The Los Angeles Times celebrated the Fourth of July by telling readers of “notable signs in recent weeks” of Biden’s mental decline. The Washington Post held to the same time line one day later, reporting that the then-81-year-old president “displayed signs of accelerated aging in recent months, said numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3 1/2 years, noting that he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a year ago.” Three days earlier, The New York Times noted, “by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3 1/2 years ago,” in a story titled “Biden’s lapses are said to be increasingly common and worrisome.” The Wall Street Journal, which precipitated the avalanche in early June, recounted inside tips from Democrats who “described a president who appears slower now,” especially “[o]ver the past year.” Historian and liberal partisan Douglas Brinkley would allow only that “there’s been a slowdown in the past two years.”

Even as the stories broke, Biden administration sycophants gave the president the kind of coverage usually restricted to North Korean media. “He’s inquisitive. Focused. He remembers. He’s sharp,” swore Neera Tanden, the former CEO of the Center for American Progress and a Biden adviser, in July. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough insisted, “This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. … If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”

But the debate removed all plausible deniability (to use Biden’s phrase). Eventually, under internal party pressure and significant duress, Joe Biden quit the presidential race on July 21 and endorsed Kamala Harris.

The truth began to trickle out. The Wall Street Journal has revealed that the “protective culture” supposedly drawn up during the 2020 campaign to insulate Biden from COVID-19 “intensified” the moment he began “his” presidency; that Biden held fewer than half as many full Cabinet meetings as Barack Obama or Donald Trump in an average four years; that Biden’s inner circle made him so inaccessible that Cabinet secretaries “dealt with the president’s advisers, not the president himself.”

A suspicious person might conclude these advisers collectively served as acting president for the last four years.

The scandal in this story is not just that the media gaslighted the American people. It’s that they tried to present Biden’s decline as recent. As Biden would say, “C’mon, man.”

Even fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro raised the topic at the third 2020 Democratic primary debate — on September 13, 2019. Castro greeted Biden’s self-contradiction about whether someone had to “buy in” to his proposed socialized medicine program by asking: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I mean, I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.” (The transcript shows Biden did, in fact, contradict himself.)

Questions about Biden’s mental acuity should have flooded the nation by June 2022, when photographers caught him clutching a card marked “Sequence of Events” which instructed him:

  • “YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants.
  • YOU take YOUR seat.
  • Press enters.
  • YOU give brief comment (2 minutes).
  • Press departs.
  • YOU ask Liz Shuler, President, AFL-CIO, a question (NOTE: Liz is joining virtually.)
  • YOU thank participants.
  • YOU depart.”

By then, no one could have been surprised by the commander-in-chief’s creeping senility. Biden regularly described recent conversations with long-dead European leaders, warned that he would “get in trouble” with staffers if he took questions, attempted to shake hands with nobody, wandered around erratically when he was able to find his way off a stage or out of a room, and occasionally had to be stage-managed by the Easter Bunny.

The American people noticed the decline long ago — and the legacy media tried to deny the reality of their own eyes then, too. “Is Biden’s Stutter Being Mistaken for ‘Cognitive Decline?’” asked the journal of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 2020. They bizarrely accused Special Counsel Robert Hur of partisanship earlier in the year when he did not charge Biden with illegally keeping classified documents in his home, because the jury would see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” NBC News went further, insisting, “Forgetting the names of acquaintances or having difficulty remembering dates from the past doesn’t affect decision-making or judgment, brain experts say.”

The legacy media obsessed over President Trump’s Diet Coke consumption for the same reason they concealed Biden’s creeping dementia: They feared the truth would puncture the tissue-thin shibboleths that maintain the Left’s grasp on power. There are many names for such a thing. Journalism is not one of them.

4. Donald Trump Is a Fascist, Nazi Rabble-Rouser, and Unique Threat to Democracy

The Left spent eight years portraying President Donald Trump as the most dangerous, incipient dictator ever to arise on American soil. “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms,” declared Harris’s social media account on June 17. But with the opportunity for heads to cool after a near-fatal assassination attempt against the 45th president in July, the Democratic Party chose to make its portrayal of Trump as a tinpot Hitler its central theme.

The Democratic Party platform initially toned down the rhetoric. The final version of the 2024 Democratic Party platform changed the sentence “Trump is a greater danger to democracy than ever” to “Trump refuses to defend core tenets of our democracy: the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of checks and balances.” In two other instances, the platform changed the word “threat” to a mildly softer, but still democracy-threatening, alternative.

But the Harris-Walz campaign’s internal polls never showed the vice president defeating Trump (see above), so Harris cranked up the Nazi campaign rhetoric to 11. “Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris at an October CNN town hall. “Yes, I do,” she replied, hardly allowing Cooper to finish his question.

When Donald Trump had the temerity to hold a campaign rally in deep-blue New York City, vice presidential candidate Walz asserted, “There’s a direct parallel” between Trump’s MSG event and “a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” as others piled on.

Harris’s closing campaign tried to assert the 2024 election amounted to a choice between Adolf Hitler and Corrie ten Boom (except that ten Boom agreed with the statement “Jesus is Lord”). “Donald Trump has openly vowed, if reelected, he’ll be a dictator on day one,” she yelled. She gesticulated wildly as sheperformed one facism-themed set-piece: “Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States of America should never again stand behind the seal of the president of the United States of America.” She concluded with the Holocaust-era slogan, “Never again!”

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” stated Trump, specifically highlighting their claim that he was a “threat to democracy” during his debate with Harris on September 10. Five days later, he would nearly take a bullet again.

The Trump-Mussolini comparison always lacked any basis save the accuser’s seething hatred of Trump. It sounded shriller after Democratic officials attempted to ban Trump from the ballot in numerous states in the name of democracy. That coincided with Joe Biden’s attempts to transfer student loan debt from its holders to U.S. taxpayers even after the Supreme Court struck down previous attempts, as well as his efforts to bar homeowners from evicting tenants who refuse to pay the rent. It preceded the DNC’s decision to quash Biden’s opposition in the 2024 primaries, then replace him with an unelected candidate at the convention (as this writer predicted) — all of which came after the Democratic Party empowered a Shadow Government of unelected advisers and Cabinet officials to run the government in Biden’s mental absentia.

Yet even after the election — in which Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote — Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) alleged, “Trump is putting into action a plan to cripple our democracy in a way we may never recover from.” Every instance of this rhetoric should remind Christians to pray for the safety of the president — any president (I Timothy 2:1-3). At a certain point, one must ask whether Democrats are doubling down on a failed campaign strategy or inviting a third assassination attempt.

5. Joe Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Biden Based Purely on Parental Love

After numerous pledges never to use his presidential pardon power on his son’s behalf, President Joe Biden bestowed a full pardon upon Hunter Biden for any crimes “he has committed or may have committed” over the course of 10 years and 11 months. The time frame overlaps perfectly with the younger Biden’s participation on the board of Burisma Holdings Limited, for which he received a modest $10 million compensation package (on the table). Biden’s statement on the issue claimed his son had been unfairly targeted for prosecution because of his name, rather than shielded from accountability for a host of potential influence-peddling scams, firearms infractions, and tax evasion charges, leaving aside his serial abuse of drugs and (potentially trafficked) women.

The legacy media immediately began to spin the Thanksgiving weekend pardon as a concrete example of President Biden’s love as a dad — and for once, patriarchy is good. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny called the Hunter Biden pardon “poignant.” Ed O’Keefe of ABC News said, “It was quite striking to see several Democratic governors and lawmakers say” that “they understand a father’s concern for his son.”

Far be it from me to question Biden’s paternal affection: Some of the messages on Hunter’s fabled “laptop from Hell” confirm Biden’s tender concern for his son. The president’s love for his family is one of his most appealing, and genuine, personal traits. On the other hand, as New York Post columnist Miranda Devine told me, “You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see that any father who puts someone with addiction problems in front of a gushing torrent of cash is not a good father. Hunter, in fact, even mentions this in his memoir. The Burisma money alone — $83,000-plus a month was just pouring into his bank account for doing nothing — was a real temptation for him.” The picture deteriorates further when you realize “Pops” Biden seemingly pushed his son into foreign business schemes of dubious legality in hopes of collecting half of his son’s take and continuing to live a lavish lifestyle while boasting about being “the poorest man in Congress” (on paper).

The Hunter Biden scandal has always been the Joe Biden scandal — specifically, whether the Biden family sold access to the senator/vice president/president. The family seemingly removed all doubt years ago. “Don’t worry about investors,” the president’s brother, James Biden, told a meeting of Paradigm Global Advisors in 2006. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” James stands accused of pioneering the Biden family graft operation in the 1970s, when he opened a night club, going on to dabble in health care schemes before initiating young Hunter into the ways of foreign business deals as his partner. Another of the president’s brothers, Frank Biden, engaged in similar surname exploitation. Hunter Biden merely expanded their territory globally. (Joseph Backholm and I detailed many of these allegations on an episode of the “Outstanding” podcast.)

Joe Biden pardoned Hunter “to protect the family business,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) told The Washington Stand via email.

Loving children is a universal human trait — and Biden is driven by very human passions. He surely loves his son but, like the influence-peddling schemes in question, his pardon of Hunter Biden served his own interests.

6. America Can’t Survive without Illegal Immigration

For the legacy media, it is not enough merely to demonize Donald Trump as a threat to democracy; it must present him, his policies, and his followers as an “existential threat” to every facet of American life. No aspect of the current administration more threatens the Left’s decades-long plan to create a permanent governing coalition than Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants.

As the propaganda arm of the Left, the legacy media immediately began warning the U.S. economy cannot survive without illegal immigration:

  • “Trump’s mass deportation plan could hurt the country more than the Great Recession,” shrinking the U.S. economy by 4.2% to 6.8%, said The Independent.
  • CNBC warned that, if Trump implements U.S. law, which sets deportation as the penalty for illegal immigration, “the U.S. GDP would shrink by $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion.”
  • The putatively middle-of-the-road NewsNation blared the headline, “Trump wants to mass deport migrants, but that could crush economy.”
  • The Boston Globe warned mass deportations would “vaporize” the U.S. economy.
  • The Wall Street Journal insisted that “food will rot” in the fields without illegal foreigners to pick it.
  • “Trump’s mass deportation and tariff plans will hurt consumers,” asserted The Philadelphia Inquirer.
  • “If [Trump] carries through on what he said during his campaign, there will be an inflation shock significantly greater than the one the country suffered in 2021,” forecasted former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
  • “Trump’s mass deportation plans would be costly,” contended CNN.
  • “Trump’s deportation plan would hurt families and economy, Senate hears,” said The Guardian.
  • “Trump Says Deportations Will Boost Wages for US Workers. History Says Not,” stated former 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg’s eponymous news service in one of several such articles.
  • Illegal immigrants “have been propping up the U.S. job market,” alleged NPR (at your expense).

But that study warning of a Great Recession-style meltdown came from the American Immigration Council, a Soros-funded open borders group. According to InfluenceWatch.org, AIC “frequently cites and rhetorically supports the work of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).”

Affiliation with far-Left groups does not ipso facto invalidate a report, yet several studies suffer from chronic errors. For instance, a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank, vastly overstates the earnings (and thus the tax contributions) of illegal immigrants in the U.S. workforce.

Others claimed deportation would cause inflation, because illegal immigrants lower American workers’ wages. Despite conceding a point open borders advocates deny, that does not guarantee high inflation. CIS calculated that the 2.07% of the workforce comprised by all immigrants reduced wages by 0.37%. Claims of massive inflation also ignore how a larger population raises prices by increasing demand for a limited amount of goods — especially in housing, as the residents of Springfield, Ohio, learned. (They saw other problems too.)

If America deports all illegal immigrants, prices will rise in some food products — but not necessarily as much as many forecast. The cost of produce would rise in the long run — by 2% in the winter and spring months, or 3% over usual summer-fall prices, according to CIS. For context, grocery prices have risen 28.5% between the 2020 election and this March. The 10.8% surge in food prices between April 2021 to April 2022 represented the highest level of food inflation since November 1980 — the month Americans elected Ronald Reagan president.

Deporting illegal immigrants may reduce the ever-growing welfare state. An estimated 59% of homes headed by illegal immigrants receive one or more welfare programs, imposing a cost of $42 billion. (Illegal immigrants are not eligible for most benefits programs, but their anchor babies or relatives who live in the U.S. legally are.)

In 2017, the Center for Immigration Studies calculated the net cost that America’s illegal immigrant population imposes on U.S. taxpayers at between $746.3 billion and $1.5 trillion … and that was the pre-Biden illegal immigrant population. “Based on data from a National Academies report covering all taxes paid and benefits received at every level of government, we estimate that the average illegal immigrant imposes a lifetime fiscal cost (in net present value) of about $68,000,” wrote immigration scholar Jason Richwine of CIS this October.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, highlighted a study from Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which found that $150.7 billion in taxpayer funds was spent on illegal immigrants — five times as much as the Manhattan Project and nearly half as much as all of World War I. As Dan Hart of The Washington Stand explained, “The FAIR study, which was released in March of last year, combined estimated expenditures by the federal government ($66 billion) with state and local costs ($115 billion), minus $31 billion in estimated tax contributions from migrants.” The $70.4 billion America spends educating illegal immigrants’ children in public schools could pay for 1.1 million teachers, and the $18.9 billion spent on trying and imprisoning criminal aliens could employ 300,000 police officers, FAIR has calculated.

The media have an agenda. Truth plays no role in it.

7. Tim Walz, Folksy Backwoods Hunter

If Joe Biden didn’t exist, the Democrats would have to invent him. Kamala Harris attempted to conjure up a Biden clone this summer. After Harris replaced Biden on the presidential ticket, she attempted to reinvent him by choosing an older white male who had some plausible connection to fly-over country. The computer-dating result was Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, whom the Harris campaign and the legacy media (but then, I repeat myself) presented as a homespun, Midwestern football fanatic and outdoorsman not afraid to take a backseat to a woman.

“Is Tim Walz too folksy?” asked the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times summarized “Tim Walz as a Harris Ally: Folksy, Factually Sloppy and Far Less Visible.” USA Today encouraged readers to “Call him Coach,” as they noted, “Tim Walz, governor and congressman, chooses a folksier intro to voters” as their potential vice president. Several legacy media outlets agreed with the sentiment of one headline: “Tim Walz is redefining masculinity for young voters.” Ultimately, this failed line of thinking culminated in the Harris-Walz campaign’s misbegotten “Man Enough” ad.

Once voters got a look at Walz, the image faded. Elon Musk lampooned Walz’s limp-wristed, flamboyant mannerisms. Video surfaced of the alleged hunter struggling to load a 12-gauge. “Tim Walz claimed he carried ‘weapons of war in combat’ but he can’t load a shotgun?” asked singer John Rich. “Tim Walz looks as comfortable loading a shotgun as Kamala does answering basic questions,” said talk show host Buck Sexton.

That overlooks then-teacher Tim Walz’s weird relationship with a student who identified as a homosexual in the early 1990s. Tim and his wife, Gwen, took the student to see the Indigo Girls, a folk rock group idolized by the LGBT movement. An LGBTQIA+ website, Them, accurately reported that today, the Walzes’ behavior would be “liable to get you called a ‘groomer.’”

The Walzes went on to found a high school chapter of the “Gay-Straight Alliance,” now known as the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network. The GSA Network’s “Truth Nine Point Platform” calls for “the Abolition of the Police,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Borders and the Judicial System”; “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy”; “Reparations for all Indigenous and Black Peoples,” including “Indigenous reclamation of stolen lands”; and “free and non-compulsory education for all ages.”

In November, voters decided that’s not folksy. That’s, to coin a term, weird.

8. Project 2025

When Kamala Harris finally got around to posting her positions on the issues, she ignored the radically truncated 2024 GOP platform that Trump operatives foisted on delegates and instead wailed away on “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” The conservative policy document, which The Heritage Foundation has produced since the Reagan era, contains none of the caricatures the Left averred, and it received nothing but unbridled hostility from the Trump campaign. Yet Democrats spoke of Project 2025 on the campaign trail nearly as often as they mentioned fascism. DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison assured voters that “Trump and Vance are running on the dangerous Project 2025 agenda to put tax cuts for billionaires above lowering costs for working people, outlaw abortion, and threaten other basic rights, and put our democracy at risk.” Evangelicals for Harris attempted to craft a “Christian Response to Project 2025.”

Project 2025 dominated the 2024 Democratic National Convention more than either of the party’s 2024 nominees. Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) misquoted Project 2025 before literally ripping a page out of the book. Project 2025 presents a threat to some Democrats, he said, because “Democrats welcome weird.” Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) warned alarmed delegates on the first night of the DNC, “Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.” In her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris told delegates, “We know, and we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025.”

Harris had already mentioned the document during her debate with President Trump. “Understand,” she lectured the nation, “in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion ban.”

Even CNN’s fact-checker rated efforts to tie Trump to Project 2025 false. Yet Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) invoked Project 2025 in a hearing on the Biden administration’s abuse of FACE Act on December 18. Like the “threat to democracy” rhetoric, Project 2025 is not going away. This should call into question the Republican Party’s decision to jettison the issue from its platform. No matter how GOP elites feel, abortion — and the pro-life movement dedicated to protecting children from it — are not going anywhere.

9. Barack Obama

Project 2025 and former President Barack Obama both made this year’s list of overreported stories for the same reason: Both were irrelevant during the 2024 presidential campaign. Obama, once the heartthrob of the Democratic base, failed to ignite the party, coming off as condescending and insulting. He roared onto the political scene 20 years earlier with a speech promising unity, rode media adulation and collusion into the White House, and injected the poison of critical race theory and extreme gender ideology into every sector of government. The indifference and hostility which greeted Obama’s return to the stump is a welcome sign that the American people have awakened to the radical agenda the legacy media have concealed for the last 16 years. But then, the 2024 election proved an appropriate time for our nation to turn the page.

10. Conservatives Declaring Preemptive Victory

A boldness and grandeur of vision accompany the outset of any new administration, and the prospect of President Donald Trump’s second administration has understandably cheered the hearts of conservatives. Joe Biden has receded from memory (ours and his) long before he left office, and world leaders now greet Trump as though he were already sitting in Biden’s place.

Conservatives have said the 2024 election demonstrated the popularity of their views — and it has. But right-leaning voters should never confuse winning an election with implementing an agenda. Running on vibes is what brought 2024’s campaign of “joy” into a season of sorrow. Christians must be clear-eyed that the second Trump administration provides the opportunity for victories, but all wins come at a cost. The next four years will be an endless war of attrition and obfuscation waged from every sector of the Swamp: Left, Right, and center. And conservatives must commit to fight for their views.

They must fight against the Left which will wage, in the words of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), “trench warfare.” During the first Trump administration, the institutional Left used every lever at its disposal to thwart and stymie the democratically elected president’s agenda. They created and popularized lurid conspiracy theories about “Russian collusion.” The permanent bureaucracy waged its own “Resistance!” from within. Congress impeached him, twice, over paper-thin allegations. Then those on the Left tried to remove him from the ballot, imprison him, and finally execute him.

But conservative Christians must also contend against bad advisers near the president. Trump learned a great deal from the staffing errors of his first administration, yet he also leaned too heavily on social liberals in his extended family circle.

The president will need spiritual cover every step of the way. It is up to us to wage spiritual warfare by praying for the president of the United States, all civil authorities, and our armed forces. We must pray that they receive mercy, life, peace, health, salvation, and the visitation of angelic hosts to guide their deliberations, formulate their policies, and establish the work of their hands. Until then, Christians must remind themselves that the only promised victory comes when the government is upon His shoulder as every knee bows at His throne.

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Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.



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