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velshi fasc author TO 40 academics fired (diff fields wapo AA woman?) much worse than maccarthy

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fox bs

e president of the Turning Point USA chapter at the University of Chicago wants repercussions for a faculty member who was arrested for suspected violent crimes on Oct. 3 at an anti-ICE rally.

"Professor Eman Abdelhadi’s history of inflammatory and anti-American rhetoric is deeply concerning. Students deserve a safe and open campus environment where they can express their views without fear of intimidation or retaliation from faculty," Tyler Shasteen told Fox News Digital.

Abdelhadi, an associate professor in the school's Department of Comparative Human Development, was arrested on Oct. 3 and charged with two felony counts of aggravated battery to a government employee and two misdemeanor counts of resisting/obstructing peace stemming from a rally outside the Broadview, Illinois ICE facility.

A mugshot of Eman Adbelhadi from Oct. 3, 2025. (Cook County Sheriff's Office)

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CONDEMNS VIOLENCE BUT DODGES QUESTIONS ABOUT PROFESSOR ARRESTED IN ANTI-ICE RIOTS

Rallies, some of which have turned violent, have been ongoing there for weeks.

"Professor Abdelhadi’s statements, which clearly endorse violence, are unacceptable and undermine the safety and well-being of our community," said Shasteen. "I call on the University of Chicago to review her position and ensure accountability for any actions that violate university policy or the law."

Last week, the school condemned violence, but has resisted answering questions about whether Abdhelhadi has been disciplined.

Abdelhadi has been largely silent, too. However, she thanked her supporters on Bluesky early last week.

"Thank you so much everyone for the messages of love and support," she said on the platform. "I feel fortified by your presence in my life and in the world. I keep thinking about all our neighbors and siblings—hundreds in Chicago alone—who’ve been detained into the unknown of horrendous facilities. We owe them resistance."

Police clash with demonstrators during a protest outside an immigrant processing and detention center on Oct. 03, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. The site has been the target of frequent protests as federal law enforcement agents continue Operation Midway Blitz in the Chicago area, an operation designed to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants living in the area. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FAR-LEFT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR CHARGED WITH VIOLENT FELONIES DURING ANTI-ICE RIOTS IN BROADVIEW

Just a day before her arrest, she accused ICE of "terrorizing our communities" on a far-left podcast.

"I mean, in Broadview, ICE has been setting up shop in our backyard. Just brazenly taking up community resources to terrorize this very same community," she said.

She also put out a call for resistance, and lambasted those who she believes aren't taking extreme enough action.

"At this point, you are either on the side of protecting our neighbors and protecting our community, or you’re on the side of this administration. There is no neutral ground in this moment. There’s no center left. You’re either resisting or you’re complicit," she said.

At the Socialism 2025 conference earlier this year, she also slammed her employer.

"F--- the University of Chicago, it’s evil, you know it’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space? I kind of had a little bit of disdain for people who spent their time doing that," she said on a panel during the far-left gathering.

A demonstrator is detained as people protest outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview facility in Chicago, Ill., Oct. 3, 2025. (Jim Vondruska/Reuters)

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"Turns out, I work at one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago. I work at a place that is a landlord, a healthcare provider, a police force, f--- that s---, but, they are, and a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize… actually, this is where I need to build power. That’s possible structural leverage," she said.

The University of Chicago and Abdelhadi did not return comment requests.

Peter D'Abrosca joined Fox News Digital in 2025. Previously, he was a politics reporter at The Tennessee Star.

Follow Peter on X at @pmd_reports. Send story tips to peter.dabrosca@fox.com.

Related Topics

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REF

Inside the Hidden Conservative Network Bankrolling an “Ecosystem” of Right-Wing News – Mother Jones

GFX

“Now more than ever, the world needs an honest newsroom.” With these words, the little-known Informing America Foundation was awarded the $250,000 Gregor G. Peterson Prize in “venture philanthropy” last December for its “high-quality journalism.”

If few had heard of IAF, hinted the nonprofit’s CEO, Debbie Myers, it was by design. “We stay very much under the radar,” she said, accepting the prize at the 2024 annual summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that works to advance conservative policies at the state level. IAF’s goal, Myers explained, was to create an “ecosystem” of news. The group boasts of funding a network of thousands of platforms that have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories, from the alleged corruption of Joe Biden to the supposedly nefarious mission of the US Agency for International Development, along with more recent attacks on critics of President Donald Trump.

Myers, who once led Gingrich 360, Newt Gingrich’s multimedia production firm, is a longtime TV executive who helped produce shows such as Little People, Big World; Talk Soup; and Punkin Chunkin. Her “partner in crime” in launching IAF in 2021, as she described him as he joined her onstage, is John Solomon, a former investigative reporter for the Associated Press and Washington Post and a DC fixture who has drawn criticism for pushing right-wing stories and smearing Democrats with the kind of allegations that a Post ombudsman once described as “‘gotcha’ without a gotcha.”

In 2019, Solomon was at the forefront of efforts to tie Biden to shady dealings in Ukraine on his son Hunter’s behalf, penning a series of columns for The Hill that reported dubious information from Ukrainian prosecutors with an axe to grind. A 2020 review of his work by the paper called its reliability into question, concluding Solomon had “failed to identify important details about key Ukrainian sources, including the fact that they had been indicted or were under investigation.”

In the wake of the controversy, he set up the independent outlet Just the News and launched a podcast, John Solomon Reports. In an email, Solomon defended his Hill reporting’s accuracy and claimed he has no formal role at IAF, while confirming he provides it an office at the same K Street address as Just the News and another Solomon enterprise, Bentley Media Group. In 2021, Myers and Solomon also formed the Affinity Media Exchange, an advertising business that soon inked a deal with Trump’s Truth Social to be one of the platform’s ad representatives.

IAF’s tax filings, which say its mission is funding “investigative, explanatory, data-driven and multimedia journalism,” show it brought in close to $8 million in contributions during its first year, with the largest nonprofit donation coming from the family foundation of Diana Davis Spencer, whose late father, an investment banker, once chaired the Heritage Foundation. In subsequent years, millions have flowed to IAF through donor-advised charities that do not disclose the source of their initial contributions.

IAF, in turn, has doled out funds to an array of right-leaning outlets, including Just the News and Off the Press, run by Joseph Curl, a veteran of Drudge Report and the Washington Times. ADN América, aimed at Spanish speakers, received more than $1 million from IAF in the site’s first three years of operation. The foundation sent another million-plus to Performance One Media, which owns Real America’s Voice, the right-wing network best known for carrying Steve Bannon’s War Room. Real America’s Voice gave Solomon his own nightly show in 2022, which he has used to promote IAF allies.

IAF has also directed more than $1.7 million to Star News Digital Media, a conglomerate of 12 mostly battleground state sites whose names suggest a local focus but that actually push pro-GOP partisan news. Star News’ Tennessee Star, for instance, featured a section called “KamaLawfare” prior to the 2024 presidential election that highlighted incidents from Kamala Harris’ prosecutorial tenure in California, but seemed to ignore top news events in the state. One day this past June, the homepages of Star News outlets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia looked almost identical, all covering transgender youth health care in California, New York City’s mayoral race, and a Florida sheriff’s threats against anti-Trump protesters.

Media observers have dubbed such agenda-driven news sites “pink slime”—so named for by-products added as filler to ground beef. Pink slime news is a growing phenomenon, according to University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, rising as partisan interests take advantage of the devastated newspaper market. “We saw these news deserts popping up,” he says. “It was very cheap to put in a website and say, ‘Okay, we’re doing local news.’ Local news is always seen as being more credible.” Sites like the Tennessee Star, he explains, use that perception to push “poor-quality” coverage “funded by some outside political interest.”

In 2023, the most recent year tax records are available, filings show IAF’s largest contribution—more than $1 million—went to the Institute for Citizen Focused Service, a secretive nonprofit set up by Interior Department officials from Trump’s first term. In turn, ICFS has funneled money to Pipeline Advisors, which holds a portfolio of local outlets—including the Midland Times, Austin Journal, Federal Newswire, and others—that have also been described as pink slime. All told, IAF says its news “ecosystem” includes “more than 2,000 hyperlocal platforms and 10 national platforms” reaching an audience of more than 50 million people.

One hallmark of IAF-connected organizations is that they often promote the same allegations and storylines. This is no accident: At the award ceremony last December, Myers provided a glimpse into how IAF works, explaining that each morning, the team gathers on a call to choose the stories they believe the mainstream media is ignoring. After hanging up, “we amplify each other,” she said, “and get it to the hands of the American people.”

Star News outlets regularly repackage Just theNews articles. Just the News writes stories based on Off the Press coverage and vice versa. They do not disclose their financial links. For example, Just the News covered the 2021 launch of Off the Press without noting that either organization was funded by IAF.

The network’s thousands of platforms have quietly shaped public opinion by stoking an array of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Solomon’s podcast often features guests from the broader IAF universe, including Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer and former Trump State Department official whose attacks targeting USAID as a “censorship octopus” helped fuel Elon Musk’s crusade to feed the agency to the “wood chipper.” Benz, a onetime alt-right Twitter troll, has appeared on Solomon’s show to rail against social media censorship and US foreign aid. In such appearances, he’s been identified as the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online—which is not a foundation, but which launched as a project of an organization called Empower Oversight that has also been heavily funded by IAF. An Empower Oversight spokesperson said the group served as FFO’s fiscal sponsor through February 2023. That year, Benz was paid $253,889 by ICFS.

In 2022, Benz began issuing reports from his one-man think tank positing a conspiracy to silence conservatives online. IAF-funded outlets have presented a drumbeat of interviews with him, in which he argued that outfits battling online disinformation—from media watchdogs like NewsGuard to the US military and Big Tech—were actually undertaking a project to suppress conservative voices. The interviews presented Benz as an independent expert—“Mike Benz exposes State Department’s use of USAID as an ‘intelligence cloak,’” said one Just the News headline—without revealing that his think tank was little more than a website whose existence seems to have been made possible by IAF. The interviews got repackaged as news by other outlets in the IAF stable, expanding their reach.

Empower Oversight, the organization that originally backed Benz, was formed in Virginia in 2021, just one day before IAF was registered in Washington, DC. IAF supplied Empower Oversight with the sole grant it received that year, a $400,000 allocation whose purpose, according to tax filings, was to “develop an infrastructure to cultivate, protect and work with whistleblowers.” Since its founding, Empower Oversight has focused heavily on typical MAGA obsessions, including the Russian collusion probe, purported FBI involvement in January 6, and Hunter Biden.

Empower Oversight is headed by Jason Foster—a longtime aide to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley—whom ProPublica exposed in 2018 as an inflammatory blogger who wrote under the handle “Extremist.” According to ProPublica, Foster, a “partisan combatant” known for his “conspiratorial thinking,” was the main force behind the Senate Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of research firm Fusion GPS and ex–British spy Christopher Steele, author of the 2016 memos alleging collusion between Trump and Russia.

Empower Oversight, which continues to receive most of its funding from IAF, represented Gary Shapley, an IRS criminal investigator who alleged that the Biden administration sandbagged a tax fraud investigation into Hunter Biden. (Earlier this year, Shapley briefly served as Trump’s IRS director.) Shapley’s allegations were heavily promoted by members of the IAF network, including Just the News, the Tennessee Star, and other Star News outlets such as the Pennsylvania Daily Star and the Arizona Sun Times.

During the Biden years, Empower Oversight’s work followed a familiar formula: First, it would file a battery of Freedom of Information Act requests to a federal agency, usually related to some right-wing intrigue or a query Grassley’s Senate office had submitted to that department. Empower Oversight then would frequently follow up with a lawsuit alleging deficiencies in the agency’s response. With the help of Solomon’s Just the News, it turned routine records requests and civil complaints into a PR bonanza, while fueling a narrative that the Biden administration and its supposed deep state allies were suppressing information.

While Benz did not respond to our requests for comment—and hung up when we called—he’s arguably delivered the most impact for IAF’s supporters. In April, the State Department shuttered its Global Engagement Center, which focused on combating foreign disinformation but which Benz had alleged was a government tool of anti-conservative censorship.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio rewarded Benz with an exclusive interview announcing the move. The next day, Just the News announced that the “censorship nerve center” had been shut down, and multiple Star News platforms dutifully signal-boosted the news. All cited Benz as merely a “former State official.”

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tenn star BS

Katelynn Richardson

Newly-appointed head of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Weaponization Working Group Ed Martin revealed Thursday that he may spend time looking into bar associations for targeting conservative attorneys.

Martin, who says he is being targeted by the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, told the Daily Caller News Foundation he wants to expose the “weaponization of the bar associations against lawyers.”

“The bar associations exist with a sort of monopoly, but they also exist at the discretion of the courts,” he said, noting they mostly target conservatives. “I’ve seen the impact on the legal system, not only advocates like myself who are targeted, but rank and file prosecutors who are abused by the system because the left wants to have sort of lawlessness.”

James Phalen, executive attorney of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, told the DCNF that “any matters involving allegations of disciplinary misconduct are confidential unless and until Disciplinary Council brings charges.”

Disciplinary counsel Hamilton Fox also told the DCNF that investigations are confidential until formal charges are brought.

Martin revealed in a going-away email to staff that he was under an ethics investigation by the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, Reuters reported Wednesday.

Democratic lawmakers requested an investigation into Martin in March for allegedly abusing his position as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, accusing him of “dismissing charges against his own client and using the threat of prosecution to intimidate government employees and chill the speech of private citizens.” The office previously declined in February to address a prior complaint against Martin for dismissing charges against a Jan. 6 defendant he previously represented.

“Most bar associations, state and national, are 501(c)(3) organizations,” he told the DCNF, noting that status comes with certain benefits. “If they’re not living up to what they should be, they’ll have to face scrutiny. And also, part of it is just the name and shame.”

There are hundreds of bar associations in the United States.

Other conservative attorneys, like John Eastman in California, have faced disciplinary proceedings from the bar.

Martin said the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel is “completely hypocritical” about how it does its job.

“It’s one thing for liberals, another thing for conservatives, confidentiality for themselves, and yet, somebody like me, I had a complaint against me, they exposed my confidential, the confidentiality of the bar complaint, and exposed it to random people in my work environment.”

The DOJ implemented a policy in April placing restrictions on its attorneys participation in American Bar Association (ABA) events.

“The ABA is free to litigate in support of activist causes, including by inserting itself into pending litigation as an amicus curiae,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in the memo. “The Department of Justice must, consistent with the Constitution, be careful stewards of the public fisc, represent all Americans regardless of ideology or political preferences, and defend the policies chosen by America’s democratically elected leadership-as reflected in Congressionally enacted statutes and Presidential policy choices.”

A judge blocked the DOJ’s effort to cancel $3.2 million in grants to the ABA on Wednesday.

“Part of it is the monopoly that bar associations maintain over the practice of law may have to change,” Martin said.

Katelynn Richardson is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

Photo “Ed Martin” by The Right Men’s Club.*

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https://tennesseestar.com › 2021 › 05 › 04 › independent-womens-forum-president-carrie-lukas-discusses-newsweek-piece-and-strings-attached-to-the-american-families-plan

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy - broadcast on Nashville's Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. - host Leahy welcomed President of the Independent Women's Forum Carrie Lukas to the newsmakers line to weigh in on her recent Newsweek piece and concerns over the American Families Act proposed by Joe ...

Carrie L. Lukas (born 1973)^[1] is president of the conservative leaning non-profit Independent Women's Forum (IWF). She is also a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute, a contributor to National Review Online, and a columnist for Forbes.com.^[2] Before her tenure at the IWF, Lukas worked for then U.S. House of Representative Charles Christopher "Chris" Cox as the senior domestic policy analyst for the House Republican Policy Committee and a senior staff member of the Homeland Security Committee.

Education

Lukas earned her B.A. from Princeton University and her master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Career

Previously, she worked at the Cato Institute as a social security analyst. Lukas has written several studies for the Cato Institute on social security and education policies. Her op-ed pieces have been published in, among other publications, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and USA Today. She is author of the books The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism and Liberty is No War on Women. Lukas is a regular guest on the Thom Hartmann show on the Air America radio network and in May 2009 appeared in an ABC 20/20 special produced by John Stossel.