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A Democrat member of the Georgia House of Representatives was charged Friday with lying to obtain thousands of dollars in emergency pandemic unemployment assistance, according to federal prosecutors - the third Democrat in the Georgia House to be accused of doing so. 

Dexter Sharper, 54, of Valdosta, is accused of falsely claiming he was unemployed while collecting benefits intended to those who had lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sharper allegedly received $13,825 in unemployment assistance between April 2020 and May 2021, while continuing to earn income from various sources. 

"While many of his constituents and fellow citizens were losing jobs and desperately needed unemployment assistance during the pandemic, Representative Sharper allegedly pretended to be out of work to collect a share of unemployment benefits for himself," said US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg. 

Court records reveal that Sharper certified in 38 weekly filings that he was unemployed and was actively seeking employment. Investigators say he was lying and continued to receive weekly pay from the Georgia General Assembly, as well as from his party rental business - with additional income as a musician. 

“These charges point to some disgraceful conduct at the highest level, which should shock and repulse every citizen”, said Georgia State Inspector General Nigel Lange. “The alleged activities describe a disgusting abuse by an elected official who appeared to trade his integrity for money destined for those in need. Shameful.” 

Two other Democratic state reps have been indicted on similar charges related to pandemic unemployment fraud;

In December, Rep. Sharon Henderson was charged with two counts of theft of government funds and 10 counts of making false statements, resulting in her suspension last week by Gov. Brian Kemp. 

Meanwhile, Rep. Karen Bennett resigned from office two days before she was charged and pleaded guilty to making false statements earlier in January. 

Birds of a feather, eh? 

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker),

Perhaps the most discouraging condition of the modern age is the absolute breakdown in communication among members of society.  It once seemed reasonable to expect that the Internet and social media might aid in our understanding of each other.  Instead, online forums are filled with people who speak the same language but interpret words entirely differently.

With the arrest of former CNN commentator Don Lemon for allegedly violating the religious rights of worshipers in Minneapolis, Democrats and the corporate news media have universally condemned Attorney General Pam Bondi for somehow “infringing” upon Lemon’s First Amendment rights as a so-called “journalist.”  They intentionally ignore how Lemon joined others in storming a church, intimidating congregants, and causing emotional harm to those worshipers (including children) who understandably felt as if they were under attack.  Lemon and his apologists continue to defend the organized raid of a Christian service as some kind of “protest” and describe the unwanted intruders as “protesters.”  For those who were made to suffer through the invasion, however, their ordeal felt like an act of terrorism perpetrated by terrorists whose intent was to scare those assembled to worship.

When society can’t agree upon the difference between “protest” and “terrorism,” we have a serious problem.  We have seen this dilemma play out all over the Minneapolis area recently.  Democrat officials describe federal agents conducting lawful arrests as “terrorists” and “Nazis” and defend criminal illegal aliens as “victims.”  Trained mobs of leftist agitators who intentionally obstruct the professional duties of law enforcement officers insist on calling themselves “legal observers” and “peaceful protesters.”  When Democrat officials and members of the corporate news media describe people who commit crimes as “legal” and “peaceful,” it is impossible for society to share any common respect for the law.

As a society, we have been debating government attacks on free speech and government-engineered censorship with increased frequency at least since the presidency of Barack Obama.  

Obama was the first modern American president to really go on offense against what he called “fake news,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.”  He started the pressure campaign on Silicon Valley’s tech titans to “police” their social media sites for “false” information.  While many of us vocally objected to this incipient collective of government and industry “experts” deciding for the rest of us what is “true,” Obama and his supporters insisted that “incorrect” information constituted an unacceptable national security threat.

But how can a society that disagrees about the distinctions between “protest” and “terrorism” or “criminal obstruction” and “legal observation” possibly decipher what is “correct” and “incorrect” information?  When people with power accord themselves the additional power to declare what is “true,” a viewpoint monopoly inevitably rises to crush dissent.  For free speech to function in any authentic form, the public sphere must remain a space where all information — whether true or false — is vigorously debated.

Otherwise, all we have is State-sanctioned dogma — or what the quietly dissenting members of communist societies once derisively referred to as “political correctness.”  In a distressing sign of collapsing respect for free speech across the West, too many nations today actually police citizens’ speech in order to ensure that their thoughts and words comply with narratives constructed and deemed “correct” by the government.  They do this despite having emerged victorious from a twentieth-century Cold War that routinely distinguished Western respect for freedom of speech from the suffocating Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union’s speech police.

The divisions within society have become so great that Democrats and Republicans in the United States can’t even agree about what should be protected as inviolable free speech.  Conservatives and other non-leftists have felt the sting of censorship since Obama’s presidency.  Without explicit warnings or explanations, Big Tech companies began removing online advertisers and other sources of revenue from conservative websites.  Social media companies covertly limited the visibility (and therefore influence) of conservative writers.  Search engines relegated popular conservative publications to obscurity by burying their keyword matches many pages back in relevant hits.  Without any official announcements from government or corporate authorities, it became clear that conservative voices were being targeted for elimination.

Since Obama’s presidency, that cancerous viewpoint discrimination metastasized in many directions: Banks closed the accounts of conservative publications and institutions.  Web hosts refused to support conservative websites.  After the 2020 election, the titans of Big Tech conspired to censor any Americans who argued that various forms of electoral fraud had handed Joe Biden the presidency.  The Biden administration piggybacked on Silicon Valley’s embrace of censorship by working with social media companies to censor anyone who disagreed with the government’s COVID policies.  That censorship became so pronounced that even medical research was targeted for deletion under the pretense that concerns for “public health” and “national security” justified the censorship of scientific debate.  As censorship of the 2020 election and COVID became more widespread, those who were doing the censoring kept pushing the envelope.  For a while, it really looked as if Democrat-embraced narratives concerning everything from man-made “global warming” to “transgenderism” would be declared sacrosanct and too “politically correct” for Americans to debate.  Feeling emboldened to declare “public truths,” the Biden administration turbocharged Obama’s initial directive for social media censorship by building the architecture for a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose purpose was unapologetically directed toward limiting conservative points of view.

For Republicans, conservatives, and other non-leftists, Democrats’ collusion with Silicon Valley to censor information deemed “untrue” constituted an unparalleled attack on Americans’ free speech.  As with so many other conflicts in society today, ordinary Democrats didn’t recognize this threat at all.  When they did acknowledge that conservative voices were being silenced, many immediately justified those infringements on Americans’ natural rights by repeating Obama’s original propaganda that “fake news,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and even simply information that fellow leftists judged as “harmful” to society deserved no First Amendment protections.

Perhaps more troubling, even as Democrats argue for mass censorship, they portray themselves as victims of censorship.  When parents insist on protecting their children from “transgender” indoctrination, sexually explicit guides encouraging minors to engage in adult activities, and outright pornography, Democrats pretend that parental supervision violates free speech.  When the FCC reprimands Jimmy Kimmel for lying to the American public by falsely blaming Charlie Kirk’s assassination on President Trump’s MAGA movement (instead of a leftist in a gay relationship with a “trans” furry and someone who allegedly disparaged Charlie’s Christian faith as a form of “hate”), Democrats pretend that Kimmel (who enjoys more free speech than almost anyone in America) is being censored.  When Don Lemon joins a gang of leftist agitators to trespass inside a church, disrupt worship services, and terrorize those assembled to commune with God, the corporate news media pretend that the person doing the terrorizing is somehow a “victim” of government attacks on the First Amendment.

Right now in America censorship of non-leftists is justified, while any pushback against leftist orthodoxy is falsely portrayed as censorship.  If this corrosive double standard weren’t already obvious, “comedians” such as Stephen Colbert make it more glaringly so each day.  Just last week Colbert “joked” that federal agents who enforce America’s immigration laws are worse than Nazi Germany’s SS troops.  Unlike members of that Nazi paramilitary organization, who would have surely imprisoned or murdered Colbert before he even had a chance to speak, ICE and Border Patrol agents put their lives on the line every day to arrest pedophiles, rapists, and murderers illegally residing in the United States.  Colbert calls those law enforcement officers “Nazis,” and he will continue to enjoy the privilege of expressing his vile viewpoints on television.

However, when ordinary conservatives are censored online, Colbert says nothing.  The powerful play “victim,” while the powerless are targeted and silenced.  

We may speak the same language, but our words don’t mean the same things.

Update (1410ET): As was somewhat expected, the partial US government shutdown is on track to end later today after the House passed a funding deal President Trump negotiated with Senate Democrats, overcoming opposition from both ends of the political spectrum.

A group of conservatives had threatened to use procedural maneuvers to blockade the deal but relented after Trump demanded they vote to pass the measure.

“The president nailed it down,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, told reporters.

“I’m glad we are all nails and there’s one hammer.”

The House vote was 217 to 214.

The spending package, which Trump has said he wants enacted quickly, now goes to the president for his signature.

*  *  *

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday will take up a bill to fund several sectors of the federal government as a partial shutdown enters its fourth day.

Many Democrats - including leaders - have vowed to withhold support from the package.

On Monday evening, the House Committee on Rules advanced the measure - which would fully fund five sectors of the government while extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Jan. 13 - in a party-line 8–4 vote following a more than four-hour committee hearing.

As Jopseph Lord and Nathan Worcester report for The Epoch Times, with Democratic leaders indicating that they won’t give their backing to the measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will need to rely mostly on his narrow Republican majority to pass the measure.

In a full vote of the House, Johnson can spare only one defection in a party-line vote, though some Democrats are expected to back the measure.

However, some issues with the Senate proposal could lead Republicans to oppose the measure.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a longtime budget hawk and a particular opponent of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which falls under DHS, voted against the previous funding measure due to its funding for CISA, and could oppose the stopgap measure as well.

Other Republicans have pushed leadership to attach the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to the measure.

Leadership has resisted these demands, which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says would make the bill dead on arrival in the upper chamber. The bill reported out of the Rules Committee didn’t include the SAVE Act.

Nevertheless, the passage of the legislation through the Rules Committee—which includes conservative skeptics of the bill such as Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas)—is a good sign for Republican leaders on the funding package’s prospects.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) downplayed the difficulties in comments to reporters on Monday.

“They all come down to the wire, and then we get our business done,” Scalise said.

The bill at issue would provide full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.

Democrats are demanding reforms to DHS and its subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies before they’ll support a full-year funding measure, though many House Democrats—including leadership—have expressed opposition to extending DHS funding at all before these reforms are addressed.

Rules Committee Ranking Member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), meanwhile, voiced opposition to the measure at the hearing.

“I will not vote for business as usual while masked agents break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referencing ongoing disputes related to the executive branch’s use of self-issued administrative warrants, rather than court-issued judicial warrants, to enter homes.

However, one Democrat—House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)—indicated at the hearing that she would break with her party to back the measure.

“I will support this package,” DeLauro said at the hearing, referencing the five full-year funding bills attached to the package that have Democratic support.

She said that without the funding extension for DHS, Democrats “won’t be able to bring the kinds of pressure” needed to add reforms to the full-year DHS funding package.

McGovern explained his opposition in response to a question from The Epoch Times outside the hearing room.

“Personally, [I] cannot bring myself to go for one more cent for ICE without some serious guardrails put in place, and I think the leverage we have is now more so than two weeks from now,” McGovern said.

Johnson has said he is “confident” that the partial shutdown will end with the Tuesday vote, despite indicating that House Democrats haven’t given their support to pass the Senate-passed measure.

“We have a logistical challenge of getting everyone in town, and because of the conversation I had with Hakeem Jeffries, I know that we’ve got to pass a rule and probably do this mostly on our own,” Johnson told NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

House Democratic leadership has not indicated support for the measure publicly, despite it having been backed by Schumer and other Senate Democrats.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told ABC’s “This Week” that it’s clear that the “Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed.”

“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”