10 Things AMAC Newsline Got Right and Called Early in 2023

Over the course of 2023, AMAC Newsline has worked to bring our readers informative and engaging content on the biggest stories driving conversations in everything from politics and economics to pop culture and foreign affairs. While we always base our analysis on the facts, we have also sought to provide unique and insightful perspectives on what storylines to follow. Here are ten big stories that kept AMAC Newsline readers on the cutting edge of politics this year.

1. The End of Title 42 Has Been a Disaster

In May, Biden officially ended Title 42, the Trump-era border security measure that gave Border Patrol the authority to quickly expel illegal immigrants, immediately return minor children to their families, and maintain some semblance of order at America’s ports of entry.

AMAC Newsline’s Aaron Flanigan wrote at the time that “Title 42’s official termination will represent the apex of [Biden’s] open-borders insanity” and would dramatically exacerbate the border crisis.

Flanigan has unfortunately been proven exactly correct. In June, July, and August of this year, the first three months after which Title 42 ended, there were more than 22,000 more illegal border crossings than the same period in 2022 and nearly 90,000 more illegal crossings than 2021. As of December 21, illegal border crossings had already soared above 200,000 for this month, and FY2023, which concluded in September, was the worst year on record for illegal immigration.

2. 2023 Was a Disastrous Year for the Left’s Censorship Regime

In January, Seamus Brennan detailed a report from censorship watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) that he said raises “pivotal questions worth exploring further regarding the role of federal bureaucrats and Silicon Valley operatives in censoring speech and manipulating information flows.”

“As momentum continues to build, even more information is sure to be revealed,” Brennan wrote.

That FFO report proved to be just the start of a series of shocking revelations this year about the power and scope of the left’s censorship regime.

Subsequent Twitter Files revelations in March confirmed the existence of widespread collusion between government bureaucrats and Big Tech companies to censor conservatives online – a system that journalist Michael Shellenberger termed the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” In July, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government also released a 36-page report revealing “shocking new details about the government’s involvement in online censorship operations and the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech to silence free speech.”

That same month, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Biden administration had likely violated the First Amendment by conspiring with Big Tech companies to silence conservatives. The case has since been appealed and will now be heard by the Supreme Court – setting the stage for what could be a major blow to the left’s censorship regime in 2024.

3. Soros-Backed DA Buta Biberaj Ousted in Blue Northern Virginia

Back in March, Shane Harris predicted that three far-left prosecutors, Buta Biberaj, Steve Descano, and Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, all of whom were backed by liberal billionaire George Soros, could face tough re-election bids in typically safe blue counties in Northern Virginia.

In perhaps the biggest upset of the night in the Old Dominion, Biberaj lost by 300 votes to former Republican prosecutor Bob Anderson in Loudoun County – which Biden won with 62 percent of the vote back in 2020.

In 2021, following a high-profile incident in which a trans-identifying male student raped a girl in a Loudoun County high school bathroom, Biberaj infamously allowed the rapist to transfer to another high school, where he sexually assaulted a second girl. When Scott Smith, the father of the girl who was raped, was arrested after he demanded justice for his daughter at a Loudoun County School Board meeting, Biberaj pushed to send Scott to prison. She was later thrown off the case over impartiality concerns.

Descano and Dehghani-Tafti survived their re-election bids but continue to face significant criticism.

4. Ramaswamy Takes Aim at GOP Debate Moderators

Just ahead of the third Republican presidential primary debate in November, Aaron Flanigan argued that, rather than just fielding questions from NBC’s debate moderators, the GOP candidates should instead a take advantage of a “much-needed opportunity to turn the tables on the media and hold them accountable for contorting every major news story into an attack on Republicans.”

Flanigan specifically suggested that an enterprising Republican candidate should offer the moderators “the chance to take this moment to apologize to the American people on behalf of NBC News for more than two years propagating the lie dreamt up by Hillary Clinton and her lawyers that Donald Trump was a Russian operative.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, who has proven himself to be more than willing to do battle with the liberal media, did exactly that. As Flanigan relayed in a follow-up piece, Ramaswamy “stole the show… by launching a scathing attack on the national corporate media, and saying out loud what rank-and-file conservative voters have long known to be the truth.”

In an unprecedented act, Ramaswamy also demanded that NBC’s Lester Holt and Kristen Welker answer for their network’s failure to cover Joe Biden’s many scandals and demanded an apology for NBC’s lies about the “Russiagate” hoax, while also calling out the Republican establishment for allowing a vehemently anti-conservative network to host a GOP debate.

5. Conservatives Won Major Culture War Victories in 2023

Back in February, AMAC Newsline’s Daniel Berman predicted, “In 2023, something that has not happened for decades is occurring: Conservatives are on the verge of victory in the ‘culture wars.’”

This year indeed proved to be a banner year for conservatives in the culture. From the successful boycotts of Bud Light and Target over their embrace of radical transgender ideology to the more recent pressure campaign on the presidents of major universities following their tolerance of antisemitism on college campuses, conservatives have inflicted serious damage on the left’s cultural largess and renewed hope that the right can reclaim ground some once thought lost forever.

6. Biden’s State of the Union Was a “Bizarro-World” Disgrace

Just before Biden’s State of the Union Address in February, Shane Harris predicted that the president would “likely pretend that problems simply don’t exist,” “blame everyone but himself,” and rely heavily on the media spin to bill the speech as a massive success.

As AMAC Newsline’s Aaron Flanigan catalogued following the speech, all of those predictions proved accurate. Biden blamed rising violent crime on the pandemic, inflation on the Russia-Ukraine war, and the border crisis on Republicans. Yet despite telling a number of bold-faced lies, the media gushed about all of it, with mainstream pundits variously calling Biden’s State of the Union “terrific and rousing” and “the best speech of his presidency.”

Harris also predicted that Biden would “make plenty of vague overtures to ‘working across the aisle’ and ‘finding common ground.” Biden “will claim that he ‘stands ready to work with Speaker McCarthy,’ and will almost certainly mention his old Senate colleague Mitch McConnell,” Harris wrote.

Sure enough, less than a minute into his speech, Biden told McCarthy, “I look forward to working with you.” Just a few lines later, Biden offered his “congratulations to the longest-serving Leader in the history of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell.”

Biden also mentioned a need to “work together and find consensus on important things” (without mentioning what those things are exactly) and “sit down together and discuss our mutual plans together” (without saying what those plans entail).

7. Biden’s “Bipartisan Pivot” Was a Complete Flop

In January, Shane Harris highlighted an emerging media narrative “celebrating Biden’s reinvention of himself as a great centrist icon and a hands-across-the-aisle political conciliator.” But, as Harris wrote, Biden’s bipartisan pivot was nothing but empty rhetoric, and “most Americans won’t buy it.”

Nearly a year later, Biden has failed to reverse his dismal poll numbers, and is in fact struggling even more with Independents. After three years of leading the most extreme left-wing administration in U.S. history, the idea that Joe Biden could rebrand himself as a moderate was dead on arrival.

8. Pete Buttigieg is a Failure

In January, AMAC Newsline’s Louis J. Senn wrote in response to the grounding of all domestic flights for the first time since 9/11 that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg had raised “fresh questions about the small-town mayor’s fitness for the job” and was “out of touch, tone deaf, and in over his head.”

Senn was proven right again less than a month later following the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that sent toxic chemicals spilling into a small town and important waterway.

As Shane Harris wrote, more than two weeks after the disaster, “many questions remain unanswered, including whether it is truly safe for people to return to their homes.” Buttigieg was nowhere to be found, failing to even mention the crisis until more than a week after halfhearted cleanup efforts were underway. The issue became something of a political turning point for the Biden administration.

9. House Republicans Exposed Fauci’s Corruption

Back in January, AMAC Newsline’s Andrew Abbott reported that one of the “top targets” of the new Republican-led House of Representatives would be “former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi tirelessly shielded from congressional inquiries.” Abbott further noted that Republicans could be expected to use their subpoena and investigatory powers to “demand all of Fauci’s records and correspondence from his time as a government employee.”

Both of those predictions came true, and Republicans uncovered a number of shocking details about Fauci’s response to the pandemic, including allegations that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of gain-of-function research funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Republican lawmakers also uncovered evidence that Fauci worked to discredit the so-called “lab leak” theory despite other scientists telling him early on in the pandemic that the virus “looked engineered.”

Of course, virtually none of this was reported by any mainstream outlet, and Fauci has continued to escape meaningful accountability. But House Republicans have, at the very least, begun exposing his deceptions.

10. A Political Earthquake in Argentina

Most of the mainstream press dismissed Argentina’s Javier Milei as an eccentric radical who would never become president and wrote off his strong performance in August’s jungle primary as a fluke.

But AMAC Newsline’s Daniel Berman called Milei’s meteoric rise an “earthquake” that presented a real threat to the left-wing coalition that had ruled Argentina for decades.

In November, Milei cruised to victory in Argentina’s general election and immediately began enacting a string of reforms, like immediately firing thousands of bureaucrats, that indeed represented an “earthquake” in the South American country.

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As the calendar flips over to 2024, AMAC Newsline will be ready to continue bringing our readers coverage of the storylines and inside scoops that the mainstream media won’t touch. Stay tuned!