The Brew: President Trump Pardons More Victims of the Deep State

President Donald Trump is a man who keeps his promises. His most recent pardon protects alternate electors, who stepped forward in 2020 to represent voters disefranchised by crooked voting machines. That includes bulldog patriot Leah Hoopes, whom I was privileged to meet last year, as she fought in court representing herself against state lawyers from Pennsylvania. Here’s the latest from Leah:

Let me break it down for those who don’t understand basic legal language .

The pardon states ALL US CITIZENS for conduct relating to..

Then it states this includes BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO…

WHICH MEANS ALL ALTERNATE ELECTORS from all States.

Which is this language is… pic.twitter.com/MksVhrXpCg

— Leah Hoopes (@hoopes_leah) November 11, 2025

Remember how broadly the conspiracy to slander Trump and his supporters really stretched: The leaders of the state-owned British Broadcasting Company just had to resign after being exposed for falsely editing Trump’s remarks on January 6, 2021, to present him as encouraging violence. There was violence, all right — but most of it from the government, as PJ Media reports:

Four people, all MAGA supporters, died that day. Ashli Babbitt was shot to death, and Rosanne Boyland was overcome by chemical spray and, according to witnesses, was beaten by a female police officer as she lay unconscious on the ground. Two other men were overcome by the chemicals and pepper spray eagerly shot into the crowd by police and suffered a stroke and a heart attack.

Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died the next day of a stroke.

The media and congressional leaders lied about all of it.

When you remember how comprehensively our elites, including prominent pastors, bishops, and even the Vatican, lied about COVID’s origins and medical implications, you won’t be quite so surprised. I stand by what I published right here at The Stream on January 8, 2021, while many Americans were still hiding under their beds: “The Republic Has No Clothes.”

National Review Bashes Conservative Hero Phyllis Schlalfy

Remember National Review? No, I didn’t either. Honestly, that publication has been so comprehensively wrong for so long that I didn’t just forget it still existed. Some part of my brain stepped in and prevented me from remembering it had ever existed at all — even though I used to read it faithfully back in high school in the 80s.

My mind was being charitable. That publication has jumped the shark so many times since 2016 that it seems like a Youtube reel of “fails” compiled by malicious high school incels. The most recent evidence? The magazine went after the memory of conservative Christian hero Phyllis Schlafly — a housewife and mom who single-handedly led the movement to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined in the actual words of the Constitution both abortion and homosexual activism. Mark Hemingway writes at The Federalist:

Schlafly’s self-published A Choice Not An Echo played a major role in Goldwater winning the Republican nomination in 1964. The book successfully persuaded many in the party that the Republican East Coast establishment’s grip on the party was suppressing grassroots activists and new ideas. And accordingly, voters should take a chance on Arizona’s Barry Goldwater, who was very much a GOP outsider, with new free-market, small government ideas that were seen as radical at the time. For Goldwater to win the nomination in 1964, wresting control from the establishment and giving more control to the grassroots was a huge triumph, even if Goldwater went on to get trounced in the general election. Schlafly’s book, which eventually sold more than three million copies, was hugely responsible for getting voters to not only accept a new direction for the GOP, but it also had a lasting impact of making Republican voters more involved in grassroots activism and party politics….

Hemingway cites National Review’s recent takedown of Schlafly, which says:

Rereading Schlafly’s missive, one is forced to consider a less hopeful lesson. Perhaps the Goldwater takeover really wasn’t so principled in the first place. Perhaps its longest-surviving legacy will be not conservative principle or intellectual integrity but a power-hungry populism that seems to wax strongest whenever the right is frustrated and losing its way. Perhaps the “last man standing” among those rising conservative stars will turn out to be a woman, who taught the right never to compromise and never to believe people who tell you things you don’t want to hear….

The book feels eerily contemporary for another reason. Schlafly is telling the populist story with plot points that are now as familiar to us as “once upon a time” and “happily ever after.” The nation is imperiled not by real threats in a dangerous world but by malevolent elites who sabotage American interests for purely selfish reasons. Ordinary Americans, being good and true, want sensible policies (and would mostly agree with her about what those are); if polls or analysts suggest otherwise, that’s because they’re manipulative liars. Everything depends on the breaking of the elite stranglehold.

Does this sound familiar? Is it at all surprising that Schlafly’s last significant political act, just before her death in 2016, was to give her blessing to Donald Trump?

My brain is taking over, reminding me to forget once again all about the fairy tale I once believed entitled “National Review.” It’s just a fairy tale, like “Christianity Today” and the “Ordinary Magisterium.”

The Olympics Committee Admits the Truth About the Birds and the Bees

Remember when genius scientist Bruce Jenner discovered the existence of 45 extra genders, by appearing in drag on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine? No, neither do I. But our minds play tricks on us, and in the subsequent decade our elite institutions have been gaslighting and threatening us, demanding we ignore the basic truths of mammalian biology (not to mention the Bible). Courageous pushback by feminists, Christians, and simply stubborn citizens has held back the tsunami of nonsense, to the point that even global organizations such as the International Olympic Committee have had to step back from the brink. The Daily Mail reports:

A ban on transgender women competitors is strongly expected to be in place for the 2028 Olympics – but it remains unclear if there will be barriers against athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) after the boxing furore at Paris 2024.

Under the existing rules, each sport is empowered to decide if transgender women can compete if their testosterone levels fall below a designated threshold.

But the International Olympic Committee, under new president Kirsty Coventry, is in discussions about a dramatic policy shift that would impose a blanket ban across all sports for the Los Angeles Games.

By “transgender women” the Mail means biological men who have grown out their hair or smeared on lipstick, and decided to weaponize their natural born advantage to cheat at sports.

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Challenge to Bankrupt Obergefell Decision Imposing Same-Sex “Marriage” on States

Sanity isn’t breaking out everywhere. In an unsurprising development, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to consider a challenge by courageous state clerk Kim Davis of the narrow, poorly reasoned 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which threatened religious freedom nationwide and redefined human marriage. Yahoo News reports:

 The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.

Don’t get discouraged. Some of us remember when the equally dishonest decision Roe v. Wade was touted in the Senate as a “superprecedent” and made the litmus test for getting nominees to the Supreme Court confirmed by Congress.

Along The Stream

Check out the thoughtful commentary by new Stream writer pastor Phil Steiger on how the Left has abandoned its moral compass, and the Right is getting disoriented.

Don’t miss Shane Idleman’s latest on the telltale signs of a church that has lost its way — and how you can respond fruitfully.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.