The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization, has targeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire; the person who runs the Libs of TikTok Twitter account; and Seth Dillon, CEO of the satire site The Babylon Bee, accusing them of causing violence in a new report titled “Online Harassment, Offline Violence.”
The report argues, “Anti-equality, online extremists are leading a proactive and coordinated campaign of hate against hospitals and medical providers who offer gender-affirming care for transgender, non-binary and questioning youth.”
The report states it consists of “an informal exploration across Facebook and Twitter” that identifies “24 different hospitals and providers, across 21 states, who were directly attacked online following harassing, inflammatory and misleading posts from Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh, and other right-wing accounts.”
Relying on misleading allegations of “lies” and “misinformation,” the report draws a line of causation from Libs of TikTok posting a video from a particular hospital detailing its own practices to inevitable online outrage resulting in angry tweets, emails, and phone calls from individuals, causing the hospital to stop youth-oriented transgender advocacy and/or practices and ultimately resulting in legislative efforts to ban the practices in the first place. The report gives examples of hospitals and doctors receiving hostile or angry communications, threats, and specifically, the false bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital.
The report insists, “What occurred in Boston is just one example of coordinated campaigns of hate, violence, and harassment being waged both online and offline against health care providers and children’s hospitals simply for providing age-appropriate, best practice, medically necessary medical care to transgender youth.” However, its claim of offline violence remains abstract and assumed. It provides no examples of actual violence.
Accusations of Hate Speech
Detailing what it argues is a coordinated campaign to target pro-LGBT organizations, the report notes: “hate speech accounts such as Libs of TikTok or Matt Walsh, a known transphobe at the alt-right news site The Daily Wire, post an inflammatory message full of disinformation about gender affirming care and call out a specific hospital or doctor by name.” The alleged campaign continues with “right-wing politicians looking to rile up the most extreme members of their base join in spreading the same transphobic rhetoric from their platforms, in some cases going so far as to introduce legislation to regulate children’s hospitals and gender affirming care providers.”
The final “stage” of these campaigns involves hospitals discontinuing transition practices for minors or legislative efforts that heavily regulate or ban said practices. The report concludes by placing responsibility on social media companies, arguing, “Social media companies have a responsibility to act and to not be bystanders while angry mobs intimidate LGBTQ+ people and our allies into silence.” Continuing, “Without intervention from social media companies, this will just lead to more hate speech, more threats, and more violence.”
Again, without citing any actual examples of violence, the report’s implication is that all negative interactions, from tweets to illegal activity like bomb threats, are essentially equal. The report’s authors then go further by arguing direct causation between the posting of information and the dangerous response. Their conclusion is that authorities must prevent or punish those posting the original information, which allegedly “caused” the violence.
Attempt to Silence Criticism
While obviously any form of violence or threats against an individual or organization is wrong and should be handled by the authorities, the popular left-wing argument that responsibility falls to commentators is absurd — even more so as the targets of their anger quite literally share the information left-wing activists post themselves. What the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT activists stubbornly refuse to consider is that the outrage and anger are perfectly justifiable. Despite activists’ best efforts, many people reasonably view transgender surgeries on minors as barbaric and destructive.
What these organizations are attempting to do is stigmatize anyone who participates in such criticism by accusing them of contributing to any potential violence that may occur. More to the point, they want to intimidate conservative commentators to prevent them from discussing or sharing provocative LGBT activism, often in their own words, in a way that will result in criticism or outrage. So convinced they are morally justified, they view the natural result of the public viewing this information with outrage and legislative pushback as inherently violent and hateful.
In truth, what we see is the very nature of the democracy they champion in action. A children’s hospital boasts of performing elective double-mastectomies on teenagers as young as 15, as the Boston Children’s Hospital does on its website, and the public is rationally outraged. They express their outrage to the hospital and to their elected representatives, who introduce legislation. The left typically champions public protest and the targeting of organizations with phone calls, tweets, and emails when they disagree with a policy or product decision. Such action only appears to become “violence” and “hate” when the left supports what an organization is doing.
In terms of “causing” things like fake bomb threats or threatening voicemails, the idea that illegal behavior from one individual is the fault of a completely unrelated individual is dangerous and irrational. Libs of TikTok sharing a video produced by a children’s hospital is not a direct link to an unstable person calling in a bomb threat later on. Only the person making the call is responsible. Whatever motivated them to do so is entirely within their control. We simply cannot allow the left to continue bullying critics of their agenda by accusing us of causing violence by doing so.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, corporate journalists freely persecuted their political enemies by posting their identities and locations to enable in-person harassment, but not anymore. This week, Musk decided he’s no longer allowing anyone, including journalists, to jeopardize people’s safety via Twitter, and he began temporarily suspending the accounts of offending members of the press.
“Everyone’s going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist,” Musk wrote in a Twitter post.
The crackdown on doxxing is personal for Twitter’s CEO. On Wednesday, Musk reported that his 2-year-old son named “X” was followed by a “crazy stalker” who had mistaken X for Musk. According to Musk, the stalker blocked the car driving his son and “climbed onto the hood.” The incident motivated Musk to suspend several high-profile journalists guilty of doxxing. This caused the corporate media to fly into hysterics. “Elon Musk censors the press,” said one CNN headline.” “[U]nprecedented,” stated the flabbergasted Axios. “Twitter suspends journalists who wrote about owner Elon Musk,” alleged The Associated Press. “Musk has begun banning journalists who have criticized him on Twitter,” whined Washington Post TikTok reporter Taylor Lorenz.
All this outrage is performative. Firstly, Musk made it clear why the journalists are suspended, and it’s not because they “criticized” him, as Lorenz said. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” wrote Musk.
Secondly, the propaganda press doesn’t care about freedom of the press or free speech. They cheer on and instigate the de-platforming of competing journalists and news organizations. The only thing the media cares about is losing its monopoly on digital discourse and the special treatment it received from pre-Musk Twitter staff.
Before Musk, the corporate media enjoyed gross privileges awarded to them by their ideological allies at Twitter. When Lorenz outed the identity of the formerly anonymous woman who runs the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account, Lorenz was never disciplined. As the “The Twitter Files” reveal, if Twitter staff did try to sanction left-wing users for violating Twitter rules, senior executives at the company would swoop in behind the scenes and protect them.
Meanwhile, countless conservative journalists were subject to random suspensions, locked accounts, and bans for harassment-free thought crimes. The Federalist’s Senior Editor John Davidson continues to be locked out of his Twitter account because in March he tweeted the truth: Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man. Levine, a transgender male, is indeed a man and no amount of makeup or surgery will change that, yet Twitter penalized Davidson for promoting “hate speech.” It still is penalizing him.
The Federalist’s CEO and co-founder Sean Davis was also targeted by pre-Musk Twitter and his account is still subject to a shadowban today. That means Davis’s posts are reduced in their ability to reach people. The reason for the shadowban remains unclear, but it’s fair to assume the censorship was politically motivated. The “Twitter Files” revealed how pre-Musk Twitter used shadowbanning to punish ideological dissenters against Twitter’s own terms of use.
Former President Donald Trump was perhaps Twitter’s most high-profile ban. While he was still in office, Twitter nuked Trump’s account. The “Twitter Files” show Twitter moderators admitted at the time of his banning that Trump had not violated any terms of service. The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the very real Hunter Biden laptop story was banished from the app even though it didn’t violate any of Twitter’s stated rules, either.
Unlike conservatives who were political targets of Twitter’s pre-Musk censorship regime, journalists suspended for doxxing are instigating real, physical harm. People outed and targeted by corporate media for expressing conservative views have been fired, had their businesses harassed and ruined, and been targeted for violence. Unlike the shadowbanning of Davis, the banishment of Trump, and the nuking of the Hunter Biden laptop story, doxxing journalists know exactly what Twitter rule they violated. Musk told them in plain words.
The leftist media complex is in a frenzy because it lost some privileges after Elon took over. “Handled,” one Twitter employee wrote to a “connected actor” who requested the deletion of disliked tweets, according to the “Twitter Files.”
That kind of special treatment is over. Twitter’s “rules for thee, but not for me” policy is gone, and the propaganda press is going to have to get used to it.
Evita Duffy is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
A visitor watches the work of US artist Wardell Milan, “Amerika: Klansman, David” (2019), representing a deconstructed face with a KKK hood, during a preview on December 4, 2019, ahead of the opening the following day of the Art Basel international fair that takes place annually in Miami Beach the first week of December. – Climate change, pollution, racial issues and social commentary are some of the issues addressed by hundreds of artists showcased in Art Basel by more than 200 galleries from all over the world. | AFP via Getty Images/Leila Macor
The recent controversy surrounding Thomas Achord, a classical Christian school headmaster exposed for running a white supremacist Twitter account, has proved instructive on a number of fronts. It demonstrates that real racism and white supremacy do exist, a point that the grade inflation to which these terms have been subjected by the professional anti-racists of the last few years has served only to obscure. We must not allow the trivialization of racism to blind us to the places where it actually is. It is also a reminder that a radical right that cannot effectively operate a pseudonymous Twitter account is unlikely to be seizing control of America by force any time soon.
The views Achord and his Twitter cronies expressed were vile; their impotent online posturing unintentionally comedic. And then there was the personal abuse to which Alastair Roberts, the man who exposed the situation, was subjected by professing Christians — a reminder that for some Protestants, all Scripture is inspired and perspicuous, but some parts (e.g., the imprecatory bits) are apparently more inspired and perspicuous than others (e.g., the references to kind words deflecting wrath, turning the other cheek, observing the Ninth Commandment, and those pesky sections on not insulting brothers in the faith).
Beyond the bluster, though, two other issues struck me as noteworthy. First, it is clear that identity politics has a home on the reactionary right just as it does on the progressive left. This is no real surprise: In a world where everything has become politicized, such a scenario was bound to come to pass. The danger for Christians is that the apparent polarizing of society makes the stakes of political debates seem extremely high. In such a situation, extreme positions become attractive, even irresistible. As otherwise ordinary Christians see the country slipping away from them and into the hands of those whose culture war seems to have no moral limits, there is a temptation to repay like with like and to become the mirror image of the other side. This has to be resisted. And that resistance has to start in the pulpit, where the tone and direction are set for Christians in the pews.
Some may resist and argue that this is to bring politics into the pulpit. Unfortunately, in a world where everything is political, everything said in the pulpit is already political to some degree. And as we live in a world where the central contested political questions of our time all connect to the question of what it means to be human, then everything has to be political at some level. Now, this is not to say that preaching should be party-political, nor that its primary focus should be this world rather than the next. But it is to say that, after the commandment to love God, the commandment to love one’s neighbor is next in order of importance. And loving one’s neighbor — knowing how to live in the polis — is political. Thus, if there is in Christ no Jew or Gentile, then the racism of the right and of the left has no place in the Church.
The second issue that the Achord controversy touched to some extent is that of Christian nationalism. The term itself seems rather slippery, covering everything from hard-right racism to what many of us would simply have regarded as old-fashioned patriotism. In this context, a recent essay by Brad Littlejohn is a most welcome and helpful intervention. Until there is a stable and agreed-upon definition, “Christian nationalism” seems likely to function for the left as “cultural Marxism” does for the right: a convenient pejorative for discrediting that person just to the right — or the left — of what you yourself find acceptable.
Here it might be useful for Christians of all sides to rehabilitate the term “patriotism.” Unlike many Americans, it seems, I (along with thousands of other immigrants and aspiring immigrants) actually think America is on the whole a basically good country and one that her citizens should love. There is nothing wrong with that, because love for one’s country does not logically entail that one must despise and look down on all others. Christian patriotism avoids that. Take marriage as an analogy. If a husband declares his wife to be the most beautiful woman in the world, he is not saying that every other woman is ugly. What he is actually doing is expressing his special love for her and his deep gratitude for the joyful companionship she brings to his life. To love one’s country, to be patriotic, is thus not to sneer at every other nation or to look with scorn upon other peoples. It is simply the appropriate response of gratitude and love for the place where one belongs, that gives one an identity, that provides one with community and with purpose. Seen in that light, to be unpatriotic or to espouse chauvinistic nationalism are both morally wrong.
The tawdry Achord affair has revealed an ugly side to a certain part of the American Christian world. Real white supremacy really exists and is a real sin. It requires real action and real repentance from those Christians who espouse it. But in reacting to this, we need to be careful not to fall into the sin of ingratitude for other things — such as the country, warts and all, that we call home.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary of the English Language,” first published in 1755, defines the word “woman” as, “The female of the human race.” And until October of 2022, the word “woman” was still defined as, “An adult female human being” in the Cambridge Dictionary. What transpired on the topic during the intervening 267 years? Not much. Science confirmed what men and women have known since Adam and Eve began talking past each other — not only do the sexes have immutable physiological differences, down to their genetic matter, but they observe, act, and think differently as well.
Yet Cambridge now says the definition of woman is, “An adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth” (and the definition of a “man” is someone who “identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”) How does one use “woman” in a sentence? One of Cambridge’s examples is, “Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.” Who assigned Mary’s sex? Her parents? God? Evolution? The SRY gene? And what other human characteristics does Cambridge believe can be altered according to one’s feelings? Lexicographers have a responsibility to offer clarity and accuracy — which is, of course, impossible in this case.
When asked about the change, Sophie White, a spokeswoman from Cambridge University Press, told The Washington Post that the editors had “carefully studied usage patterns of the word woman and concluded that this definition is one that learners of English should be aware of to support their understanding of how the language is used.” This is tautological gibberish. Though, in fairness to White, “Wokeish” is a relatively new language.
The Post, for instance, claims Cambridge updated its definitions for “woman” and “man” “to include transgender people.” (Incredulous italics mine.) This also makes zero sense. If Cambridge changed the definition of “black” or “Caucasian” to incorporate “Asian people,” it would not be including a new group, it would be altering the fundamental facts of what makes someone black or white or Asian. “Woman” is not a neologism. Our understanding of “woman” hasn’t been altered by new scientific discoveries. Nothing has changed.
As hard as I try, it is difficult not to bring up Orwell these days. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell notes that the “struggle against the abuse of language” is often treated as a “sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes.” But how can we deny that ideas are corrupting language, and language is corrupting thought?
At first, these liturgic declarations of one’s “pronouns” seemed relatively harmless to me. And, not that it matters much, but I’ve been perfectly willing to refer to adults in whatever manner they desire. It’s a free country. Pursue your happiness. It’s not like gender-bending is some new idea. In my real-world experience, I find that most people try to be courteous.
It’s one thing to be considerate and another to be bullied into an alternative reality. But that’s where we are right now. Placating the mob has led to the rise in dangerous euphemisms like “gender-affirming care,” a phrase that means the exact opposite of what it claims. In today’s world, “gender-affirming therapy” means telling a girl she can be transformed into a boy, but “conversion therapy” means telling a girl she’s a girl. The corruption of reality has led to the rise of a pseudoscientific cult that performs irreparable mutilation on kids, with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and life-altering surgeries.
And in their never-ending campaign to smear political opponents, Democrats have latched onto this idea as if it were a universal truth. If a person contends that gender is an unalterable feature of human life these days — a belief shared by all of civilization until about five minutes ago — they might as well be Bull Connor holding a firehose. Only this week, after signing the same-sex marriage bill, our octogenarian president claimed:
We need to challenge the hundreds of callous and cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need. And we have to protect these children so they know they are loved and that we will stand up for them and so they can seek for themselves.
Speaking of cynical. Does the president really believe these troubled teenagers “need” mastectomies, facial surgery, and genital removal to feel loved? Or would it be more prudent to let them wait for adulthood to make life-altering surgical decisions? Has anyone ever asked him? Biden is, of course, right that Americans should be free from threats of violence. That includes kids who are now subjected to abuse at the hands of people who have adopted this trendy quackery.
I simply refuse to accept that most Americans, or even more than a small percentage, believe children should be empowered to “choose” their sex. Rather, in their well-intentioned effort to embrace inclusivity — and avoid being called bigots — they’ve allowed extremists to, among many other things, circumvent debate by corroding fundamental truths about the world. And that’s what these dictionaries — once a place we collectively went for definitions and etymologies — have shamefully helped them do.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
‘Sunday Night in America’ panelists discuss the looming threat that China poses and how America should respond.
FIRST ON FOX: Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee are alleging in a newly released report that there are “indications” that COVID-19 could be tied to China’s biological weapons research program and “spilled over” to the general human population during an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The information was released in a minority staff report by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday night.
“Contrary to the implication of the [Intelligence Community’s] declassified report, based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information, we conclude that there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a summary of the report states. “The IC failed to adequately address this information in its classified Updated Assessment. When we attempted to raise the issues with the IC, it failed to respond.”
In a declassified assessment on the origins of COVID-19 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2021, the report states that SARS-CoV-2 was “probably not a biological weapon,” adding, “We remain skeptical of allegations that SARS-CoV-2 was a biological weapon because they are supported by scientifically invalid claims.”
Members of the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease are seen. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)
Wednesday’s report released by House Republicans also alleges that its investigation “revealed serious shortcomings with both the classified and declassified versions of the Intelligence Community’s,” and states that the omissions “likely skewed the public’s understanding of key issues and deepened mistrust.”
“The Committee believes the IC downplayed important information relating to the possible links between COVID-19 and China’s bioweapons research based in part on input from outside experts,” the report states, adding that the intelligence community “refuses to be transparent with the Committee regarding which experts it relied on.”
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 15, 2021. (Al Drago/Pool via AP) (AP)
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital that Americans deserve answers regarding the origins of COVID-19
“The American people are owed answers about the origins of COVID-19. Our report states that COVID-19 may have been tied to China’s bioweapons research program and that the Intelligence Community (IC) withheld key information from the American public’s authorized elected officials, deepening public mistrust,” Wenstrup said. “Our findings also show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bears more responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic than what has been publicly known or transparently communicated to the American people.”
“As a physician and Army veteran, I believe it is vitally important that we understand the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and strive to do everything within our power to pursue policies that will help prevent our country from being vulnerable like this in the future.”
A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
While alleging that COVID’s origins were likely tied to China’s biological weapons research program, the report states, “We have not seen any credible indication that the virus was intentionally, rather than accidentally, released.”
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province on Feb. 3, 2021. (AP)
“Nor do we claim the information we have found is a smoking gun that definitively resolves the question of the origins of COVID-19 beyond all doubt. However, the information is important to furthering the public’s understanding, and we will seek to declassify the classified version of our report in the next Congress to further the conversation,” the report states.
Adam Sabes is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to Adam.Sabes@fox.com and on Twitter @asabes10.
There are just some things in life that cannot occupy the same space.
Old Twitter and free speech.
Hillary Clinton and honesty.
BLM and ethical accounting.
LGBTQ+++ “rights” and the First Amendment.
We’ve seen all of these play out before our very eyes. The last example now seems to be a daily occurrence as Americans face dire consequence for choosing not to bow to LGBTQ activists’ social, political and legal demands. If you’re an artist, they will force you to create against your will (here, here, and here). If you’re a florist, you must participate in a wedding ceremony against your will. If you want to keep your job, you must use wrong or fake pronouns against your will. If you’re a faith-based adoption agency, you must deprive vulnerable children of a married mother and father against your will.
Farewell free speech. Adios religious liberty. So long rights of conscience. Buh bye common sense.
A handful of House and Senate Republicans have handed the Left a dangerous victory — the redefinition of the bedrock of every civilization: marriage. The entirety of the Democratic Party voted to redefine what God designed. The Republicans who voted against their own Party platform, their constituents, the Constitution, and the institution of marriage helped to pass the (zero) Respect for Marriage Act. This bill sues those who won’t comply with a lie.
The legislation’s text starts off declaring: “No union is more profound than marriage.” This is true. Marriage between one man and one woman — and the family (whether biological or adopted) created by that union — is the foundation of every society. Sadly, this didn’t stop Congress and a self-identifying “Catholic” President Biden, who blatantly defies Catholic teachings on human sexuality and our fundamental right to life, from disrespecting and dismantling marriage.
Section 6 of the bill (which acknowledges the First Amendment’s individual religious freedom and conscience protections) contradicts the entire purpose of the law which forces persons “acting under color of State” to comply or be sued. Americans who work for the government, such as public school teachers, don’t lose their Constitutional rights. There is such painful and predictable irony that a “progressive” bill which claims to provide equal protection under the law proudly treats millions of Americans unequally.
The (zero) Respect for Marriage Act and the First Amendment cannot co-exist. They will always be at odds. This is evidenced by widespread Leftist efforts to force religious organizations and people of faith to bow to LGBTQ+ dogma or be fined, fired, deplatformed, sued and/or bankrupted.
Hollywood, news and social media platforms have been relentless in swaying 71% of Americans to support same-sex marriage. According to Gallup, the only “holdouts” are those who attend church weekly. Yet even that resistance has dramatically waned. In the last 20 years, support for same-sex “marriage” in that demographic increased from 20% in 2004 to 40% in 2022. Pew Research, unsurprisingly, shows a similar startling trend where 61% of Americans polled say same-sex “marriage” is “good for society.”
What changed? Biblical morality? Nope. Biblical fidelity? Yup.
In a 2020 study done by Dr. George Barna for Arizona Christian University’s Cultural Research Center findings revealed that only 6% of American adults have a biblical worldview. Tragically, a majority of evangelicals — 52% — reject absolute moral truth. That percentage is even higher with Mainline Protestants (60%) and Pentecostals and Charismatics (69%). Well, that explains a whole lot! If you don’t see things through a biblical lens, your vision is dangerously distorted. This is why, on every moral issue, the remnant that is faithful to enduring truths dwindles with each year.
The latest polling on Americans’ attitudes toward redefining marriage reminds me of a prominent poll back in 2013 by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. When respondents were asked if they wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned, a massive 70% said ‘No.’ Leftist news media, Planned Parenthood and their pro-abortion allies touted the “7 out of 10” stat for years to justify the violence of abortion.
Yet, there was a stat that every mainstream news outlet ignored. It was the first question of that same survey (therefore really hard for so-called journalists to miss) which asked: “Do you approve or disapprove the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision?” Thirty-nine percent approved. Eighteen percent disapproved. But a whopping forty-one percent responded: “Don’t know enough to have an opinion.” So, in a poll that claimed 70% of Americans don’t want Roe overturned, 41% of those surveyed had no idea what the Roe decision was.
Once upon a time, the gay rights movement claimed it was merely seeking tolerance of homosexuality. Today, the LGBTQ+++ movement demands conformity and the politically-enforced confusion and coercion of language. The same activism that claims men can be pregnant, that sex is assigned at birth, and children know their gender identity “from the womb” understand that legalizing gay “marriage” legitimizes their entire LGBTQ+++ worldview.
Feelings and facts often tend to go their separate ways. This is, of course, to our own detriment because uninformed feelings become public policy. Public policy shapes behavior. And behaviors (mis) shape a society.
Policies have consequences. Bad policies have casualties. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose daughter is in a homosexual union, proclaimed: “No matter who you are or who you love, you too deserve dignity and equal treatment under the law.” Really? Then why didn’t Congress legalize bigamy, polygamy, incestual unions, objectophilia, or marriages between children and adults in the legislation?
Love is love, right?
Nope. God is love. When we understand that and how love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13, we can’t pretend that our culture’s brokenness is something to celebrate. Anytime a word, like marriage, means everything, it becomes nothing.
“Well, that ship has sailed,” we’re told by politicians, pastors and propagandists who want us to capitulate to the latest trends. Those who love people enough to speak and live the truth know the ship is sinking.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.
It’s not clear whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is hostile.
Musk could be motivated by deeply personal reasons to battle Big Tech’s enforcement of Marxist identity politics. Or he could be attempting to do damage control for the regime by duping people who have reason to distrust the regime into believing Twitter is now more trustworthy. There are many other possibilities, too, and it’s impossible for outsiders to know which is true.
After all, the Twitter Files haven’t so far released that much new information. We already knew Big Tech was colluding with federal officials to deny Americans free speech and therefore self-government. We already knew the internet’s dominant infrastructure is completely rigged. We already knew Donald Trump’s Twitter defenestration was based on Twitter employees’ personal animus against him, not any objective reading of company policy.
We already knew Joe Biden is likely owned by foreign oligarchs who pay his son Hunter for access and influence, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story’s suppression was a deep state influence operation that tipped the 2020 election.
Whatever is going on behind the release of the Twitter Files, good things can come of it. This wormhole likely goes very deep, and even what we’re seeing now, quite close to the surface, is alarming and indicative enough. Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.
This is very likely why we’ve been hearing increasing alarms about “protecting democracy.” The existence and prevalence of this chant online is itself a strong indicator that democracy, or the concept of self-rule through free and fair elections, as the basic bloke thinks of it, doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, that’s certainly the case if Big Tech, in collusion with unelected officials who are almost as far-left as Twitter’s employees, selects what information voters may receive.
Twitter censorship directly or indirectly is what led to the horrendously regressive COVID policies, Biden's presidential victory, and why we got the record inflation, energy, crime, illegal immigration and Fentanyl crises. We are here today because of what Twitter did.
This Twitter-capade reveals further details about Big Tech’s function as an arm of U.S. “national security” and “intelligence” agencies. Decades ago, these agencies started going rogue on the formerly inalienable constitutional rights of American citizens, with tacit acquiescence from Congress through repeat authorizations and increased funding. These agencies and the entities they’ve colonized now treat the American people like occupied foreign territory, subject to psychological manipulation and institutional infiltration in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party.
In fact, this whole affair emits more than merely a whiff of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and fascist. For one thing, the Twitter Files details about the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agency employees and Twitter — and surely also Google and Facebook — recall that Germany’s infamous National Socialists embedded party operatives on “private” company boards. So does today’s Chinese Communist Party.
One must also consider the possibility, if not absolute likelihood, that many of these “former” U.S. military and intelligence agents working at Twitter and Co. are not actually former, but covert government agents. I hear the practice is called “sheep dipping.” Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker certainly fits that description. So does Vijaya Gadde.
Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
It’s also noteworthy that a number of these types, including Baker and big fat lying former CIA Director John Brennan, seem to be laundered through CNN and MSNBC stints as “security analysts.” I.e. to use TV to spread regime-desired disinformation, such as to help quash the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.
"…multiple episodes suggesting that Twitter had been penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance" pic.twitter.com/6Nm4ds0rtk
So, twitter employees were working with the FBI and foreign intelligence. And the higher ups were warned and were totally cool with it to the point they fired the whistle blower to silence the story. Just amazing. https://t.co/FxUsK8wajF
This use of spycraft against American citizens seems to be an increasingly recurring and increasingly visible aspect of our post-2016 dystopia. Recall that it appears to have been a feature of the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” the 2020 Michigan tyrant “kidnapping” false flag operation, the Spygate operation, the attempted FBI entrapment of Sen. Ron Johnson, and many more.
While the vast majority of Americans don’t use Twitter, it has a massive, outsized influence on every American’s everyday life. We saw that in real-time with the consent spiral manufactured, possibly by national security agencies, to impose unprecedented lockdowns in 2020.
Twitter has a fraction of the users of every other major online network, yet it controls the political conversation because of who uses it and how they use it. It’s helpful, even if not literally true, to think of Twitter as an influence operation targeted at Congress, the executive agencies, the corporate media that control the ruling Democrat Party, and other members of the ruling class. That’s who its users overwhelmingly are, especially the most active.
Twitter is where people go to link up to the woke hive mind. That’s why it’s poison to everyone, but especially Republican officeholders.
This is why Republican politicians make some of their stupidest decisions when framed by what they see on Twitter, because the Twitter “consensus” reflects the opposite of their constituents’ views. (This disconnect is a major reason The Federalist exists.) It’s simply a pressure tool for the leftist mob. That’s also why big business leaders are idiots to respond to Twitter mobs — the majority of their customers don’t pay any attention to Twitter.
This information asymmetry has been highly destructive to the American republic but highly useful to the nefarious actors who run our deeply corrupt federal agencies. For one thing, it has allowed the veiled imposition of a vast information iron curtain across Western countries where many people believe themselves to be free citizens. Twitter is the tip of the spear for this growing censorship regime now consisting of a shadowy web between federal officials, social media-sponsored “fact checking” censorship hacks, Big Tech, corporate media, intelligence agencies, and who knows what other entities.
Twitter has been the typical initiator of bans on a person, organization, idea, or conversation from an online voice — and sometimes from basic life necessities such as banking. Then Facebook, Apple, Google, and others follow suit. The other colluding entities get Twitter to do the heavy lifting of canceling a dissenting person, political movement, conversation, or idea, then just file behind and copy Twitter so they avoid blowback.
We now have more evidence to add to the growing pile establishing that Twitter wasn’t just functioning this way because almost all of its employees were far-left Democrat activists. It also has been rigging public conversation, and therefore public life and elections themselves, at the behest of elected and unelected Democrats using their public positions for deeply partisan gain.
The Biden administration admitted it was flagging specific posts for Twitter to take down. It called for Big Tech to inflict “consequences” on those who disagreed with Democrats, and attempted to publicly formalize its evisceration of this vital tool of democracy — free speech — with a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Biden administration’s national security apparatus openly declared that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat politicians could be investigated as a potential “domestic terrorist”!
These government-entwined monopoly platforms obviously exist to disseminate coordinated information operations and kill competing information. They are staffed with de facto or actual intelligence agents at levels high enough to disappear key internal records. Anyone who claims these are simply “private companies” is either not intellectually competent, in denial, or part of the ongoing psy-op to deny Americans the right to make their own political decisions based on genuinely free and open public discussions.
As the year winds down, the border is about to break wide open. In less than a week, the Biden administration’s last remaining tool to control illegal immigration, left over from the Trump administration, will be taken away.
Title 42, the public-health order invoked by President Trump during the pandemic that allowed immigration officials to quickly expel most migrants caught crossing the border illegally, will end on Dec. 21 by order of a federal judge. Once Title 42 is gone, federal agencies at the border will have no choice but to process and release nearly every illegal border-crosser. It will represent a full return to the Obama-era “catch-and-release” policy. Border Patrol estimates they could see as many as 14,000 arrests per day in the coming weeks, which would totally overwhelm the border.
For migrants, there is now every incentive to do just that. Word of Title 42’s demise has almost certainly reached migrants in Mexico already, who now know that if they cross the Rio Grande, they will be allowed to remain in the United States, with work authorization, for years while they await the outcome of an asylum hearing.
Biden, who repealed or severely curtailed nearly every one of Trump’s border policies upon taking office in January 2021, has no plan for what to do now. Axios reported this week on a vague plan circulating among Biden officials for a temporary (five-month) moratorium on asylum, but the plan hasn’t been approved. It’s unclear how it would even be implemented with less than a week to go before Title 42 ends.
Many of them are from Nicaragua, which means they can’t be deported to Nicaragua (the U.S. has no deportation agreement with the authoritarian dictatorship of Nicaragua’s president-for-life Daniel Ortega), and they can’t be expelled to Mexico, which refuses to take back Nicaraguans. So, the U.S. is just letting them in, giving them a court date for an asylum hearing years from now, and releasing them. Never mind that many of these migrants, by their own admission to reporters, are economic migrants who have no valid asylum claims.
Back in August, my colleague Emily Jashinsky and I reported on the migrant encampments and shelters in the Mexican border towns of Matamoros and Reynosa across the Rio Grande from Brownsville and McAllen, Texas, respectively. Most of those migrants were Haitian, although they had been living in various South American countries for years, with legal status. They came to the border for a chance to get into the U.S. and pursue what one of them told us was “the American dream, a dream for all Haitian people.”
The reason so many had been waiting in Mexican shelters was that they feared being deported back to Haiti, where they hadn’t lived in many years, or because they had already tried to cross and been expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. They could not afford to pay the cartels for multiple river crossings, and so they were waiting, they told us, for U.S. policy to change.
Their wait is almost over. Once the threat of expulsion under Title 42 is gone, there will be little to hold them back. The border will become a chaotic, ungovernable disaster. We will likely see the appearance of tent-like refugee camps on the U.S. side of the border, as we saw in Del Rio, Texas, in the fall of 2021. To put the figure of 14,000 arrests per day into context, three years ago, during the 2019 border surge, President Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, said that 1,000 apprehensions a day “overwhelms” the system and that he “cannot imagine” what 4,000 arrests per day would look like.
2022 was the worst year for illegal immigration in U.S. history. 2023 will be worse yet. As long as the Biden administration maintains its open-border policies, illegal immigration will increase, the cartels that profit from migrant smuggling will get rich, and the border will descend into chaos.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
“Look in my eyes, what do you see? The cult of personality. I know your anger- I know your dreams, I’ve been everything you want to be- Oh, I’m the cult of personality Like Mussolini and Kennedy, I’m the cult of personality, The cult of personality, the cult of personality.”
In 1988, those lyrics by American rock band Living Colour were the opening of their biggest selling single to date, “Cult of Personality”. Its cryptic title came from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 anti-Stalin report, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.”
Forty years after the song’s release, guitarist and writer Vernon Reid explained its meaning this way: “The whole idea was to move past the duality of: That’s a good person and that’s a bad person. What do the good and the bad have in common? Is there something that unites Gandhi and Mussolini? Why are they who they are? And part of it is charisma.” For many, our Achilles’ heel is that we are drawn to the charismatic qualities of persons or things but are blinded to their detrimental aspects. Based on these principles, cults have and will always exist.
For Pharmaceutical company heiress Melinda Rockwell, her ‘cult’ experience hit home after her daughter Annabella began attending Mount Holyoke College in 2011; a $60,000-a-year all-women’s institution of higher learning. Most of her fellow-first-year attendees assimilated easily to Holyoke’s gender-fluid programs and practices- but not Annabella.
She focused on her studies and buried herself in her courses. It wasn’t long however, when she herself noticed subtle changes in her own behavior. In an interview with the New York Post, Annabelle, now 29, explained how she slowly lost control: “This professor tells me about the patriarchy,” Rockwell said.
“I barely knew what the word meant. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I wasn’t someone that into feminism. I just knew that I felt I had always been free to do what I wanted. I never experienced sexism. But I was told there’s the patriarchy, and you don’t even understand it’s been working against you your whole life. You’ve been oppressed, and you didn’t even know it. Now you have to fight it. And I just went down this deep rabbit hole.”
Deep Seeded Changes
After graduating from the college, Annabella was clearly no longer the same: “I left school very anxious, very nervous, very depressed and sad. I saw everything through the lens of oppression and bias and victimhood. I came to the school as someone who saw everyone equally. I left looking for injustice wherever I could and automatically assuming that all White men were sexist. My thoughts were no longer my own.”
According to the Post, Melinda believed her daughter had been brainwashed. She also felt that if she pushed Annabella too hard, she might lose her forever. Not knowing what else to do, she took drastic measures to free her daughter from this prison of indoctrination. She decided to use a $300-a-day deprogrammer, and Scott Williams, Rockwell’s former tennis coach, to fight the Svengali-type hold that, “was no different than cults like the “Moonies” and the” Children of God.”
Annabella had no idea how apropos her mom’s comparison of Holyoke was. As a result of the “deprogrammers” methods she is now free and credits her mom’s relentlessness. Melinda learned a lesson just in time that far too many parents learn too late: the desire to control the minds of students is much more sinister, prevalent, and rampant than you think.
A Young Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
The online site, mindingthecampus.org unveils a much more nefarious, surreptitious plot to snare the minds of our children. In addition, it also reveals the broad scope of their ideological attack. “The alliance between the public education establishment and the march of “progressivism” is as natural as anything could be,” states George Leef in his article “A Racially “Woke” Agenda Is Now Hardwired in Public Schools.”
“Public education depends on the power of government: to tax, to build schools and hire teachers and administrators, to compel student attendance, to minimize or even prohibit competition. As the poor quality of many public schools has become increasingly evident over the last several decades, the education establishment has become an utterly slavish ally of the political left. It depends on the coercive fist of government.”
At the same time, the political left has become ever more reliant on the education system (K-12 through college and beyond) to inculcate statist ideas in people. If voters were inclined and able to think through the harmful consequences of “progressive” policies such as minimum wage laws, welfare payments, the Green New Deal, government-run health care, wealth taxes, and so on, they would toss the leftists out of office.
It’s far better for those politicians if as many voters as possible are conditioned to support candidates who mouth clichés about the evils of capitalism, the need for compassionate government, the imperative of transforming America, so it will be a just society, and many others.”
These are the new cults. Contrary to how they appear, there is little daylight in comparison to the ones you’ve heard of from the not-so-distant-past. Today’s cults are just as mesmerizing, and just as deadly. In the examples to come, you will see how the cults of the past hold the keys to avoiding or even escaping those of the present-and the future.
Come back Thursday for Part 2 of this exploration of the modern day cult.
Two months after the FBI subpoenaed the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, the Drug Enforcement Administration searched the office of Hunter’s one-time psychiatrist Keith Ablow and seized a second laptop Hunter had left with him. The timing of the DEA raid and the fact that criminal charges were never filed against Ablow, coupled with whistleblowers’ claims that the FBI buried evidence against Hunter Biden, raises the question of whether the search was a pretext to recover Hunter’s laptop and protect the Biden family.
While the DEA’s recovery of the second Hunter Biden laptop escaped scrutiny over the last nearly three years, a Washington Post article from Saturday brings that laptop into focus — and with it questions about the DEA’s seizure of the laptop and agents’ decision to return it to Hunter.
Back in the News
In a weekend article titled “Some Hunter Biden Allies Making Plans to go After His Accusers,” The Washington Post reported that Hunter and his closest advisers are plotting an offensive for when Republicans assume control of the House of Representatives in January. The strategy sessions to counter what Biden associates frame as “an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans” began last September, according to the Post, with a meeting at the California home of Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris.
Morris, already famous in the entertainment industry as an attorney for the co-creators of “South Park,” gained notoriety when the New York Post reported that Morris “footed Hunter Biden’s overdue taxes totaling over $2 million.” In addition to Morris, David Brock, a liberal activist, reportedly joined in the September 2022 strategy session. “At one point, Hunter Biden himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts,” according to the Post.
While not detailing Hunter’s purported thoughts, The Washington Post reported that Morris suggested “it was crucial” “for Hunter Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.” According to Saturday’s article, Morris then described during the September meeting at his California home the “defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani.” Morris also reportedly “outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.”
Brock provided more insight, telling the Post: “They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there.” “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like,” Brock said of the September meeting. To aid the efforts, Brock planned to start a new group — since launched — named Facts First USA, which Brock described as a “SWAT team” designed to “ensure that the media and public do not accept the false narratives that flows from congressional investigations.”
More recently, according to the Post, “Brock’s group, Facts First, is engaging with Hunter Biden and those in his immediate circle.” Brock is reportedly “reviewing research that Morris has conducted on Biden’s adversaries, including Bobulinski and Mac Isaac.”
According to The Washington Post, Morris and others are also focused on whether the data claimed to be recovered from the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at the Delaware computer repair store, “was improperly obtained and distributed,” with Hunter and his allies suggesting that the materials released by Giuliani and others may not have originated from the laptop Hunter abandoned at the repair shop. Instead, the help-Hunter crew posits that the information may have been improperly taken from a laptop Hunter left with Ablow, whom the Post frames as “close to Republican activist Roger Stone.” The Post then reported that “Morris has been overseeing a forensic analysis of that laptop to determine if it was the basis of the hard drives that were later distributed by Trump allies.”
Morris began floating a similar tangled conspiracy theory in May 2022, with CBS News reporting, “Morris and his team have been circulating provocative slides that tease a coming counter-narrative to political attacks against the president’s son.” The slides describe a “contextualized theory” positing that “there was no laptop dropped off with Mac Isaac, just a laptop which Hunter abandoned on Feb. 1, 2019, at the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Keith Ablow.”
The New York Post’s Miranda Devine also lighted the conspiracy theory Morris floated in May, writing: “Morris alleges in his scrawled mind map, and in conversations with confidants, that Trump ally Roger Stone and his lawyer, Tyler Nixon, masterminded a plot with Ablow and Mac Isaac to create ‘clones’ of the laptop left in Newburyport to damage Joe before the 2020 election.” Morris pushed the theory based on Stone writing a foreword for Ablow’s 2020 book, “Trump Your Life,” and Ablow’s appearances on Fox News.
But as Devine detailed in her article, the material contained on the MacBook abandoned at Mac Isaac’s business included material created after Hunter had left the laptop with Ablow: “The biggest problem with Morris’ conspiracy theory of the ‘Ablow clones’ is that there are authentic videos and other material unique to the Mac Isaac laptop that were created after Hunter left his second laptop at Ablow’s office.”
Ablow has also dismissed the counternarrative as “a work of fiction,” stating: “I never looked at any laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, much less shared any laptop belonging to Mr. Biden with anyone, ever.” “I wouldn’t know how to access a password-protected laptop if my life depended on it,” Ablow added. Stone reportedly said the theory is “insane conjecture bordering on defamation.” Mac Isaac described it at the time as a “loose effort to muddy the waters.”
In response to Morris’s most recent push, as captured in Saturday’s Washington Post article, Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, told The Federalist, “As we have always said, Hunter Biden knows it is his laptop. That is why neither he nor his father have ever actually denied that it is his.” “The night before the story broke,” Della Rocca added, “Hunter’s attorney reached out to John Paul to ask about whether he still had Hunter’s laptop.” What Morris is doing now, Mac Isaac’s attorney claims, is “nothing more than trying to create more of a stir so the story will be worth more in Hollywood.”
Beneath the Surface
Whether crafting a Hollywood story or an offensive strategy to protect Hunter Biden, what Morris and Hunter’s other confidants fail to realize, however, is that by pushing the theory that the material recovered from the Delaware laptop originated from the laptop left with Ablow, they are resurrecting a story that received little scrutiny at the time: the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office. And since Morris first pushed this conspiracy theory in May 2022, “highly credible whistleblowers” have come forward and accused the Department of Justice and FBI “of burying ‘verified and verifiable’ dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation.”
So, the question arises: Was the DEA’s raid of Ablow’s office a pretext to recover Hunter’s second laptop? And relatedly: Did the DEA return the laptop to Hunter without securing the evidence first for the criminal investigation against the now-president’s son?
While most Americans now know of the infamous laptop Hunter reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store, shortly after the New York Post broke the news that material recovered from the laptop implicated Joe Biden in Hunter’s shady business dealings, NBC News reported on Oct. 30, 2020: “[A]ccording to two people familiar with the matter, a different Hunter Biden laptop landed in the custody of the DEA in February when they executed a search warrant on the Massachusetts office of a psychiatrist accused of professional misconduct,” the psychiatrist being Ablow.
The February 2020 raid on the office of Hunter’s one-time Massachusetts-based psychiatrist Ablow received only passing mention at the time, with local outlets reporting that the DEA claimed the execution of the search warrant was part of an “ongoing investigation.” Coverage at the time also highlighted the revocation of Ablow’s medical license for alleged “inappropriate sexual activity with patients and illegally giving prescriptions to employees.”
There was no mention of the recovery of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden at the time, or at any time until two unnamed sources told NBC News of that detail on Oct. 30, 2020. Since then, Ablow confirmed that Hunter left his laptop at a bungalow attached to Ablow’s office in 2019, where the Biden son was reportedly staying for intravenous ketamine treatments for his addiction in December 2018 and January 2019.
Ablow reportedly “made repeated efforts to persuade Hunter Biden to retrieve his computer,” with Ablow even contacting Hunter’s attorney to arrange for its return.” However, the second laptop reportedly remained in a safe in Ablow’s basement for a year, and the DEA raided the psychiatrist on Feb. 13, 2020, then returned the computer to Hunter’s lawyer George Mesires.
Red Flags
The timing of the raid and the return of the computer to Hunter’s lawyer raises several red flags, especially since federal charges were never brought against Ablow. First, the Feb. 13, 2020, DEA raid occurred some nine months after the Massachusetts Board of Medicine suspended Ablow’s medical license on May 15, 2019, for purportedly diverting “controlled substances from patients,” among other things. One would think the DEA would act more promptly to execute a search warrant to prevent the destruction of evidence.
Second, the DEA only executed the search warrant after the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena in mid-December of 2019 to seize the first Hunter Biden laptop from the Delaware store owner, raising the question of whether the real goal was to ensure there were no more Biden laptops floating about before the 2020 presidential election.
Third, even if there was nothing pretextual or nefarious about the raid on Ablow’s office, that the DEA returned the laptop to Hunter’s lawyer raises other concerns because at the time, and still to this day, Hunter Biden was under investigation. In fact, it was that investigation that served as the basis for the FBI to subpoena the laptop from the Delaware repair store. Given the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, why would the DEA return the laptop to his attorney?
Given the FBI whistleblowers’ claims that government agents buried incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden, the House oversight committees should pose these questions to the DEA to ensure that federal agency was not also acting as a protect-Biden front. And we can thank Morris and The Washington Post for reminding us of the DEA’s seizure of that second Hunter laptop — something that at the time seemed straightforward but, given the developments over the last six months, now smells suspect.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that NBC News, not CBS News, first reported on the DEA’s recovery of a second laptop.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things.
Technocrats, “journalists,” the president, and self-styled experts often view unfettered speech as a cancer that threatens “diversity” or “social justice” or “democracy” or “the environment” or “safety” or “unions” or dozens of other issues that are perched high above speech in the hierarchy of modern values. The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters.
You don’t have to be a free-speech absolutist to believe that banning the president from tweeting on an allegedly neutral platform undermines the spirit of open discourse.
We are now often a society of self-censors, which, as Orwell noted, is as pernicious as any other variant. Sure, you can have your say, the leftist assures you. You just can’t have it on any platform or outlet with wide reach. Just look at the thermonuclear meltdown on the left over the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk — a man whose sin is professing to believe what any self-respecting liberal did a decade ago.
Orwell, though, was concerned that independent journalists and publishers would “keep certain topics out of print” not because they were “frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.” The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with.
It is. In 2017, I wrote about Trump’s threats to revoke NBC’s broadcast license for spreading fake news. Of course, NBC News has no constitutional right to that license, but threatening your critics clearly conflicts with once-accepted principles of free discourse. The same goes for Trump’s executive order empowering the White House to collect complaints of “online censorship.” Oh, how distressed liberals were over this attack on free speech.
Yet, when, in July of 2021, Jen Psaki casually noted that the White House had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” there was not a peep from any of them. Biden Communications Director Kate Bedingfield later contended that social media companies “should be held accountable” for the opinions of commenters, singling out “conservative outlets who are creating irresponsible content.” Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing people to have their say. This is before the DHS tried to set up a Ministry of Truth.
On what constitutional grounds did the executive branch — which has the power to punish companies — get involved in monitoring the opinions of citizens on private outlets? Not a single champion of “democracy” thought to ask. (Unlike many conservatives, I am a fan of Section 230, which allows sites to host third-party content without worrying about being sued. It restrains litigiousness and allows a chaotic internet to exist. If legislators in 1996 had understood the open nature of the project, we would not have this internet. Handing government bureaucrats more power to arbitrate fairness by removing these protections — as if the state has ever bolstered dissent — would be a tragic miscalculation.)
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson and his allies passed the Sedition Act, empowering the postmaster general to censor letters, pamphlets, and books over the threat of “false reports or false statements” — which all sounds quite familiar. The authoritarian mission creep soon led to arrests, including that of a socialist presidential candidate. But Wilson didn’t only fight the scourge of misinformation and fake news with laws and cops, he did it with the help of powerful newspaper owners and business interests. The blacklisting of actors and directors by big studios in the 1950s wasn’t compelled by law, it was voluntary.
Throughout history, authoritarians have claimed that liberty must be subdued because of some perilous historical moment. That moment is now every time Democrats don’t get their way. If these people have no problem with the state and corporations that control the public square working together to dictate appropriate speech, how long is it before the idea of curbing “dangerous” “disinformation” through legislation is normalized? Maybe this iteration of the Supreme Court will offer a temporary bulwark against attacks on liberalism, but at some point, if a majority of voters stop caring, it won’t matter who owns Twitter or who sits on the court. You can’t compel people to be free.
No, we’re not going to be Stalinist Russia. We’re probably going end up much like modern Europe, a less vibrant, less free, less dynamic place. Which is bad enough. Don’t worry, you’ll still get to say whatever you want. You just won’t be able to say it anywhere important.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
The New York Times broke the news last Sunday morning that the Iranian government abolished its notorious morality police, government agents who enforce a strict dress code based on the state’s interpretation of Islamic Sharia law. They have become a universally condemned symbol of oppression after 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died on Sept. 16 in Tehran after the “morality police” arrested and beat her for not wearing her hijab “properly.” Amini’s death sparked nationwide protests that continue today.
The Times celebrated Iran’s abolishment of the morality police as an “apparent victory for feminists.” Other corporate media, from The Wall Street Journal to CNBC, quickly repeated the Times’ story. Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” began her interview with the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken by saying, “I want to start with some breaking news overnight out of Iran, they have abolished the morality police.”
Yet within minutes of the Times’ reporting, human rights activists in Iran and the West denounced the Times story as false. U.S.-based Iranian activist Masih Alinejad tweeted, “It’s disinformation that the Islamic Republic of Iran has abolished it’s [sic] morality police. It’s a tactic to stop the uprising.” Another Iranian activist, Amin Pouria, tweeted, “To lift world’s public opinion pressure, the IR changes [the] name of the ‘Morality Police.’ However, Iranian women & girls are still beaten, imprisoned or killed like #MahsaAmini for mandatory dress code. Don’t let the IR fool you with lies and be Iranian’s voice.”
Even Iran’s government and state media have denied suspending the morality police. Iranian lawmaker and cleric Hossein Jalali reportedly said the morality police are here to stay, and “the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on women not wearing proper hijab will continue with a range of measures that may include blocking their bank accounts.” Kasra Aarabi, an analyst of the U.K.’s Tony Blair Institute, called the Times’ story “fake news.” He pointed out in his tweet, “This disinfo was propagated today to distract media attention from the 3 days of major protests in #Iran which begin tomo. Why did mainstream media ignore this context?”
It turned out the Times’ report was based on a vague comment by Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri. When asked by reporters why people hadn’t seen many “morality police” on the streets, Montazeri replied, “The morality police had nothing to do with the judiciary, and the same institution that established it has now shut it down.” The Times ran its story based on this comment while ignoring what Montazeri said: “the judiciary will continue to supervise social behaviors.” After the pushback from Iranian human rights activists, some media began questioning or adding context to the story. Still, the Times has issued no correction or apology to its original report.
How did Western corporate media such as the Times get the morality police story wrong? Corporate media today are less about reporting straight news than advocating narratives, and people who work at these outlets see themselves as activists more than traditional journalists.They search for and only report news that supports their preferred narratives. The fake story of the morality police’s abolishment fits neatly with the narrative that courageous feminists forced an authoritarian regime to make a compromise. It was such a perfect story that the Times’ reporters ran with it rather than spending time to verify and confirm it with more reliable sources.
I see a similar pattern in how Beijing’s latest moves to lift some Covid restrictions after week-long national protests were reported. One analyst of Human Rights Watch tweeted, “The Chinese government is now easing Covid restrictions, thanks to the protesters who courageously took to the street.” While it is true that Chinese protesters were courageous, and Beijing did announce some relief from its Covid restrictions this week, it is delusional to interpret Beijing’s action as a comprise to the protesters.
The Wall Street Journal reported that some Chinese officials were quietly seeking ways to ease the “zero Covid” restrictions to rescue China’s falling economy months before the nationwide protests. According to the WSJ, “Chinese exports fell at the steepest pace in more than two years in November, the latest indication of how the country’s pandemic restrictions and waning global demand for goods are throttling China’s economy.” Besides the economic toll, Beijing is concerned that the continuation of strict Covid controls would “threaten China’s key position in global supply chains” and “lead to a broader decoupling between China and the world.” While Xi publicly vowed to stick to his “zero Covid” policy, he permitted the lifting of some Covid restrictions because even he was keenly aware that economic instability would lead to social unrest. The economic reality, not the nationwide protests, drove Beijing’s latest announcement.
While there is easing, some loathed Covid restrictions remain in place. For example, in some cities, when even one person in an apartment building tested positive, local Covid police sealed the entrance and exit to the entire building and confined all residents in their tiny apartments, forcing them to survive on limited and often overpriced food delivery. The continuation of these inhuman restrictions should surprise no one because Beijing’s “zero Covid” policy was never about health care but controlling people.
Besides chasing narratives, the lack of understanding of the true nature of authoritarian regimes is another explanation for why corporate media outlets often fall for authoritarian disinformation and inadvertently become useful idiots for these regimes.
It is common for democracies to respond to people’s will and make necessary policy changes. But authoritarian regimes do not budge, and their response to civil disobedience is more violent oppression. Since nationwide protests erupted in Iran, more than 18,000 protesters have reportedly been arrested, and the death toll of protesters surpassed 470. This week, Aarabi tweeted that the Iranian government executed another young protester and announced more future executions. Canadian human rights activist and lawyer Kaveh Shahrooz said in an interview, “Iran’s regime is not normal; its official statements are often lies designed to mislead the world. Our media should not take them at their word and must exercise extra caution when reporting on Iran.”
The CCP is not normal, either. It didn’t send tanks to flatten protesters last week only because the regime has found a better way to crack down on dissent without the “unpleasant” visuals of protesters dying in broad daylight. In recent years, Beijing has perfected its surveillance tools in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs. By persecuting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists under a dubious national security law, the Chinese authorities have not only silenced the city’s political dissent but also established the illusion that the CCP practices “rule by law.”
Beijing has already deployed these tactics to identify and intimidate protesters. Additionally, Covid-tracking QR codes that every Chinese citizen was forced to download on their phones to “track not only their COVID-19 risk status, but also their minute-by-minute movements — where they go, how they travel, and the people they encounter — data that is available to police.” Even if not all of these protesters end up in jail, the omnipresent social credit system will ensure they live a miserable life, unable to travel, find employment, open a bank account, or even own a pet.
If the corporate media truly care about maintaining their credibility and striving to support people who live in authoritarian regimes who yearn for freedom and democracy, they need to develop an understanding of these authoritarian regimes and understand that tyrants do not compromise. Corporate journalists must stop passing on these regimes’ disinformation, no matter how well it fits their preferred narratives. They must also find the decency to apologize and retract reporting when proven wrong.
Helen Raleigh, CFA, is an American entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. She’s a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her writings appear in other national media, including The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Helen is the author of several books, including “Confucius Never Said” and “Backlash: How Communist China’s Aggression Has Backfired.” Follow her on Parler and Twitter: @HRaleighspeaks.
On Monday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk vowed to defeat what he termed “the woke mind virus” a day after tweeting his pronouns were “prosecute/Fauci.”
“The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” Musk tweeted.
1. On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.
Meanwhile, retired astronaut Scott Kelly, brother of Sen. Mark Kelly, attacked Musk for his offensive tweet.
“Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community. They are real people with real feelings. Furthermore, Dr Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives,” Kelly tweeted.
Musk responded:
“I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.”
“As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.”
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The problem for conservatives headed forward is not so much mail-in ballots as it is mail-in Republicans.
If Haggai the prophet were around today, he’d likely chastise conservative voters as follows: “Consider your ways: You have sown much and you bring in little. You eat without being satiated. You drink without getting your fill. You dress, and it has no warmth. And he who profits, profits into a bundle with holes.”
No matter how much the Republican Party cheats on its base – committing sins that the eyes cannot unsee – conservatives continue to slavishly genuflect to the party’s every whim and offer to carry water for Republicans. They treat Republican politicians as the masters rather than the servants. They believe we must support them at any cost rather than understanding that they need our support to even exist, because Democrats already locked up the voters they truly desire. Conservative influencers continue to view themselves as loyal Republicans and refuse to explore any blunt force trauma to this perfidious party that would force a cathartic moment when either we finally take over the party or we have a critical mass to either start a new one or use the GOP only for ballot access but form a party within a party.
The scope of the problem is not limited to a few RINOs. In fact, we are the RINOs. With the exception of a handful of Republicans who accidentally win office, almost every elected Republican is either indifferent or downright on the other side of the issues that really matter, in the way they matter, and at the time they matter. Just consider that only one senator and only one governor are fighting the issue of our time – biomedical tyranny. Or the fact that not only did a bunch of Republicans vote with Democrats to codify gay marriage as a right against religious liberty, but not a single leadership member in either party spoke out against it and none whipped against it.
In order to secure our votes, they pretend to be with us on the issues that don’t matter, or in the way and at the time they don’t matter. Then they employ a brilliant tactic to keep us on the plantation – threaten us with the prospect of the Democrat winning, the very same Democrats they work with on the issues that matter.
Cunningly, the Republicans understand that while they have no problem working with the Democrats, their base is truly revolted by and fearful of the Democrats. Hence, the argument of “but the Democrats” resonates the most precisely with those most likely to rebel against the perfidious party leadership. Thus, they have created a never-ending zero-sum game. The more the GOP commits perfidy and works with the Democrats on the issues of the time, the farther the political landscape and Overton window shift to the left. The more disquiet and fear instilled in the base about the Democrats further winning, the more the base is hoodwinked into voting Republican without doing any much-needed political surgery.
If you take this vicious cycle to its logical conclusion … it has no conclusion – other than us inexorably becoming wards of Klaus Schwab’s AI transhumanist kingdom. Because whether the issue is COVID, Ukraine, marriage, immigration, spending, global warming, no matter how much the Republicans screw us, they can always turn around and say, “Well, it’s going to be worse if the Democrats win.” In reality, it’s the GOP that acts as the forward advance guard or the getaway car for the Democrats – it’s a one-two step in which the Democrats could not succeed in what they are doing without a veneer of bipartisanship so that they won’t own the blame or fallout of their destructive policies.
Conservative talk show hosts and news influencers need to be asked: What is their plan to stop this cycle of failure and degeneration? And is there no limit to the perfidy of the GOP or particular Republicans that will finally prompt them to stop voting for them? Until conservatives are willing to shoot the hostage, they will never wield any leverage over the Republicans. McConnell and company rightly wager that Republicans will always come back to them because they have nowhere else to go. Jared Kushner said as much to Trump in advocating that he deviate from the MAGA agenda on certain issues.
As we explore multiple ways to shake up the party, particularly at the state and local levels in solid red states first, we must be willing to make it clear that at some point there is a bridge too far. Remember, the establishment torpedoes our candidates in the rare instance that they win the primaries. They not only refuse to support them but openly undermine them. We must return the favor.
The interesting thing about the Republican Party in the way it’s currently constituted is that it not only hates its base, but it increasingly does not appeal to independent voters, despite the fact that Democrats don’t really appeal to them either. Now is the perfect time to begin running respectable candidates with new ideas on an anti-elitist message but devoid of the typical divisive labels to appeal to a broad subset of the electorate who are deeply dismayed with the status quo of the duopoly. There is no silver bullet, but here is a rough outline of things that must be done concurrently:
A pledge against elite globalist Republicans: We don’t need perfection, but when you have Republicans openly undermining us on the key issues of the time, we need a petition of hundreds of thousands of Republican voters pledging they will never vote for them – primary or general election. A good place to start are the 12 Senate Republicans who voted to force gay marriage and its accompanying rainbow jihad against the church upon our communities. Almost all those 12 Republicans are in solid red states and undermine us on many other issues too. For example, Thom Tillis, who is a liberal pretty much on every issue, is also working on an amnesty bill with Democrats. It needs to be made clear that these people will never have our support.
Run independent candidates in the general election: So does this mean you just “let the Democrat win”? That should not stop us from running truly independent candidates in the general election for statewide office who have a broader message and have not been attached so much (or at all) to the Republican Party. I offered a blueprint for this in the Pennsylvania Senate race, when it became clear that Oz was both a leftist and unelectable, that we should have run someone from the medical freedom movement and strip the labels of “conservative” and “liberal.” We need to break the paradigm of the binary uniparty, and we only need one race to break this impervious monopoly. Also, unlike an official new party, it’s fairly easy to get on the ballot as an independent in most states. And nothing appeals more to swing voters these days than the label “independent,” which is something all of us who hate the status quo – from traditional conservative to populists or disenchanted classical liberal – should embrace.
Continue to run primaries with better focus: Where possible, we should still run in Republican primaries, but focus more on governors than on the House or Senate. The federal government is lost. We need to focus on getting more governors like Ron DeSantis in red states, yet at present we have not even a single one. Our entire primary focus should be on governors for red states like Utah, West Virginia, North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri, which are all up in 2024 but have lackluster GOP governors. There is an immediate opportunity in Kentucky, which has its election next year and is currently held by a Democrat. So far, Savannah Maddox, the most conservative member of the legislature, appears to be the best candidate. And again, when the result of the primaries is unacceptable to us, we should look for independent candidates with a broad appeal. This strategy has promise not only in solid red states but in swing states as well. As for downballot offices – from state legislature to school board and county positions – it’s hard to have a slate of independent candidates with enough money and name ID. We can probably only target this strategy of running independents initially for statewide office. So, for lower offices we will have to run Republicans; however, we need candidates who don’t consider themselves as Republicans and are merely using the party for ballot access – the same way the party uses us for our votes. For legislative bodies, we should make it clear that these candidates will form their own caucus and use their leverage against GOP leadership when needed, almost rendering it like a parliamentarian system. Once elected and having achieved notoriety, they can consider switching to independent, similar to what Kyrsten Sinema has just done after leaving the Democrat Party.
Switch from popular primaries to state conventions/caucuses: In swing states, the Republican brand is not only fraudulent but also toxic. In red states, the brand is still intact, but most red states are run by perfidious Republicans. I can write an entire book on how it’s nearly impossible to knock off Republicans in a primary without a scandal, and even most open seats are hard to win. They have all the money and use it to fool voters by running on our issues with no intent of fulfilling their promises. There is one way to change this cycle of failure. Rather than forcing candidates to raise millions of dollars, money only the bad guys have, they should go through a caucus or convention system whereby voters in precincts elect a representative to vote for them at a convention. The activists know who the frauds are. If you had a Utah-style convention in a state like Texas, Gregg Abbott would have lost his primary. This is the only way to get in a critical mass of non-Republican Republicans in one election cycle. Several years ago, I wrote an outline explaining how this would work.
Focus activism and pressure over issues, not just elections: The way to create a political environment either for primary challenges or independent runs is for conservative voters – who are busy with life, work, and family – to actually know just how bad their GOP governor and legislators are. We need a focused pressure campaign to expose the issues and personnel during legislative sessions so people realize in their deep red districts just how long their Republican representative has been faking it. Every policy opportunity in every legislative session must be exploited, and every bad policy from executive branches in red states must be pointed out and pressure brought to bear on the two-faced Republicans to “convert or die.” Getting active on the issues, especially at the state and local levels, which are less saturated with activism than Congress, is more impactful than elections.
There is a common denominator to all of these action items. They require a mindset that we are the masters of the GOP, not its servants. We must start holding Republicans’ feet to the fire, not carrying water for them. We have no obligation to them. There is a middle ground between continuing the same failed GOP game for the rest of our lives and immediately starting a new party. We make it clear that the Republican Party as it is currently constituted is dead to us, and we act in our own interests. The above ideas are just the beginning of an outline of what that practically looks like. Some of my colleagues in this business might be content to continue playing the game, but for me, I’m done. Life is too short to double down on failure.
The third batch of “Twitter Files,” published by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, revealed Twitter’s former lead censor, Yoel Roth, joking about the company’s collusion with government intelligence entities.
“After [Jan. 6, 2021], internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies,” Taibbi wrote, publishing internal Slack messages that show Roth “lamenting a lack of ‘generic enough’ calendar descriptions [for] concealing his ‘very interesting’ meeting partners.”
“I’m a big believer in calendar transparency,” Roth said in one message. “But I reached a certain point where my meetings became… very interesting.”
In response to a colleague who commented “Very Boring Business Meeting That Is Definitely Not About Trump ;)” Roth responded “Preeeeeeeetty much.”
“DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR,” Roth wrote in another message.
The Slack messages offer more evidence of explicit coordination between the government and Twitter to censor conservative accounts. The second batch of Twitter Files, published by independent journalist Bari Weiss on Thursday, revealed the lead of the company’s Strategic Response Team (SRT), a group designated to run the platform’s shadowban operations, was a former federal intelligence operative. Jeff Carlton, the team’s head, was previously an analyst for the CIA and the FBI, according to his since-deleted LinkedIn page.
This week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk also revealed that the company’s deputy general counsel, who played a key role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, was a former general counsel of the FBI.
Weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter blocked users from publishing links to blockbuster stories from the New York Post that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures. Emails that showed the former vice president’s direct involvement with Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling schemes came from an abandoned laptop in Delaware. Despite no evidence the computer was ever hacked, Twitter suppressed the story across the platform citing its hacked materials policy. The first batch of “Twitter Files” out last week showed that the company deliberately shut down the bombshells from the Post out of partisanship.
Jim Baker played a pivotal role in censoring the story at Twitter as the company’s deputy general counsel, telling colleagues “caution is warranted” that the content might be the consequence of a hack. Prior to joining Twitter, Baker was instrumental in the FBI’s deep-state operation to undermine President Donald Trump by peddling the Russia hoax. Musk fired him from Twitter Tuesday and announced the termination with a tweet.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk wrote.
“His explanation was …unconvincing,” Musk wrote in a follow-up on Baker’s justification for suppressing the laptop story.
Another post from Taibbi showed Twitter Policy Director Nick Pickles asking colleagues if employees could refer to corporate relationships with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as “partnerships.”
In one internal Slack post published Friday night, Taibbi further exposed the partisan nature of Twitter’s censorship operations. On Oct. 9, 2020, someone shared a Trump tweet with Roth which read, “Breaking News: 50,000 OHIO VOTERS getting WRONG ABSENTEE BALLOTS. Out of control. A Rigged Election!!!”
“‘[A] rigged election’ would be enough to be in violation right?‘” wrote an employee whose name has been redacted.
“If the claim of fact were inaccurate, yes,” Roth wrote, then added, “But it looks like that’s true,” with a link to an articlefrom NPR.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Anew survey shows that after schools arbitrarily shut down for several consecutive months, parents of all political backgrounds continue to take on the rigors and responsibilities of homeschooling long after schools have reopened.
Educators in both public and private schools should be asking why this is. Why would parents decline the services of certified professionals running various curricular and extracurricular programs at an operational, fully equipped campus just down the road? Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars go into these schools, which not only educate children but serve as the cultural center of most localities. By homeschooling, parents are saying no to all that — along with the lifestyle they could have without kids at home — and instead shouldering the burdens of pedagogy, instructional materials, scheduling, behavioral management, and socializing their kids throughout their academic careers.
Not only this, but why would parents on the left who agreed with lockdowns and are largely sympathetic to public schools opt to homeschool? According to the survey, “47% of new homeschoolers skewed leftof center self-reporting as either progressive or liberal (vs. 32% pre-Covid homeschoolers).”
Educators need to investigate this, but rather than confront the glaring problems of schooling — low standards, chaotic classes, corrupt bureaucracies, rampant tech addiction, and leftist propaganda — or do the slightest bit of soul-searching, nearly all administrators and educators have dismissed these concerns and now pretend that the last two years never happened, except when they need to make excuses to the communities they serve. The monopoly on public education has afforded them the luxury to forget everything and learn absolutely nothing.
Nowhere is this complacency better illustrated than in the recent book “Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now” by Anya Kamenetz. Despite devoting more than 300 pages to the mistakes made by public school leaders and education unions during Covid, Kamenetz never thought to question the general mediocrity of these institutions. Instead, she wholeheartedly supports them and advocates for more funding. How exactly will more money make up for the learning loss and the psychological damage done by derelict school systems? Kamenetz never says, but she does find time to attack President Trump.
This leaves parents of all political persuasions to determine what they can do to save their kids. Sure, some may fight the good fight and send their kids to public schools, be more vocal at school board meetings, and keep a close ear to what’s happening in their children’s classes. Others may be blessed with a classical school that recreates the old-fashioned learning experience that prevailed in the West before things got so bad. And some may simply hold their noses and think happy thoughts as they drink the Kool-Aid, convincing themselves that everything will be fine and that their clinically depressed and gender-confused child who spends xir days binging on violent anime and #neurodivergent TikTok videos is simply going through a phase and will learn to read and do math eventually.
Or they can try homeschooling. It may be a huge commitment of time and energy, but it’s also the only real way to protect kids from bad kids, bad teachers, and bad ideas.
Although Covid has exacerbated the situation, the rationale for homeschooling isn’t all that new. What’s notable is how homeschooling today appeals to conservatives and leftists alike. While conservatives have always liked the option of homeschooling as a means of safeguarding their values and avoiding the harms of government incompetence and modern decadence, leftists generally paid lip service to public schools (while sending their kids to private schools) and looked down on the homeschooling crowd as fundamentalist crackpots doomed to being unsuccessful losers.
This has changed in recent years. Now it’s leftists who want to safeguard their values and circumvent the problems of formal schooling. Ironically, their reasons for doing this are the exact opposite of why conservative parents homeschool. These parents actually believe that schools are way too traditional in their values and instruction, don’t offer enough accommodations to suit their children’s learning style, and still do too little about Covid. They fear their child will be bullied, receive bad grades, and be red-pilled by that one Christian conservative teacher they have for English.
Despite certain school boards and superintendents doing their utmost to adhere to liberal orthodoxy, this does little to change the conservative nature of their actual schools. As Robert Pondiscio argues in Newsweek, the very concept of formal schooling is inherently conservative: “Kids sit at desks, teachers stand in front of the room and the academic diet leans heavily on the best that has been discovered, thought and created: our language, literature, history, scientific discoveries and artistic achievements. This default mode is by definition culturally ‘conservative.’” This is often a big turnoff for leftist parents, many of whom insist on a “progressive learning” experience. Many want something student-centered, self-paced, relevant to current times, less judgmental (i.e., no grades or assessments), and altogether open and undefined — something only achievable through homeschooling.
The mutual disdain for formal schools from both the left and the right perfectly illustrates the “horseshoe theory,” in which opposing sides of an ideological spectrum come closer together as they become more extreme. So while the reason for homeschooling may be different to the point of incompatibility, the outcome is the same: Parents aren’t happy with their public schools, so they seek out alternatives.
Whether this leads to a renaissance or decline in education is anyone’s guess, though I’m pessimistic about rebirth if homeschooling becomes a leftist trend. Without a neighborhood school to provide some kind of personal stability and connection to the greater world for these families, it’s difficult to see how this benefits anyone. Conservatives usually have a church and extended family and abide by a clear set of principles; most leftists lack these foundations, so it’s difficult to see how they could make homeschooling work. More likely, they will become the “unschooled” crackpots on the margins, unable to function in society whom they have derided for so long.
The atomization of America and the epidemic of loneliness will likely get worse if too many families opt out of formal schooling. Covid demonstrated that most families need their schools, and even if schools refuse to see it, it’s also true that they need families.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Last Thursday afternoon, time expired for parents to provide comments on proposed changes to sex education in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, with a population of about 180,000 students. As The Federalist reported last week, the proposal includes labeling boys and girls, respectively, as “assigned” males and females “at birth.” It also includes curricula on “sexual orientation and gender identity” that involves watching a pro-transgender PBS video telling kids they can have “intermediate” private parts.
If you think FCPS officials will carefully consider comments and complaints from parents worried about exposing their prepubescent children to transgender ideology, and perhaps even rethink their plans, I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you. As we have seen from earlier examples of Fairfax County “welcoming comments” on proposed changes to road names, this public survey is nothing more than an empty, perfunctory bureaucratic procedure aimed at pretending that parents have a say regarding what happens during the school day.
Yet even more saliently, FCPS’s willingness to embrace this radical gender ideology and foist it upon thousands of Northern Virginia youth provokes a more important question: If our public schools can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom and knowledge can they impart?
Ignoring Basic Biology in Favor of Gender Studies
I confess a certain embarrassment to be the one writing on this. When I worked in FCPS, I taught high-school history, not science. Years before that, I earned a respectable but certainly not impressive “B” in my ninth-grade FCPS honors biology class. But I’d like to think the lessons my teacher offered on the rudimentary realities of male and female biology — which of course apply not only to humans but the entirety of the natural order — are still in effect, even if it’s been 24 years since the last time I took a test on stamens, pistils, and gametes. I can still remember us boys immaturely chuckling when our teacher discussed ova and sperm.
But this is no laughing matter. School administrators and educators across the country have dispensed with these basic truths of biology in favor of the latest “findings” from politicized university sociology and “gender studies” departments. Schools take their directives not from biology — or, God forbid, classical philosophy and its articulation of the teleological nature of the human body, oriented, as ova and sperm are, toward the creation of new life — but from politically motivated journalists who attack the few teacherscourageous enough to take a stand.
The new FCPS directive — which other school districts will undoubtedly follow — rejects stable and universal distinctions between large and small gametes and the fact that sexes can now also be determined at conception through the SRY gene (resulting in male gametes), or its absence (female gametes). They expound endlessly on “intersex” persons who supposedly undermine “binary norms,” neglecting to note that such persons are incredibly rare: Sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98 percent of humans. Of the 3.6 million babies born in America in 2021, there was some manner of sex-related deformity or irregularity in about 750 of them, according to Abigail Favale’s book “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.” But to the ideologues, a trait found in .02 percent of people isn’t a biological deformity, but a new “gender.”
The Casualties of the Curriculum
The FCPS directive can only further intensify the casualties from confused gender ideology, well documented in Abigail Shrier’s recent popular book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Little girls have been exhorted to go on puberty blockers, causing all kinds of permanent harm, from sterility to arrested brain and bone development. As I noted in a Federalist article earlier this year, a recent Heritage study observed that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” And a 2016 report found that “a large percentage of adolescents referred for gender dysphoria have a substantial co-occurring history of psychosocial and psychological vulnerability.” A growing body of research indicates that promoting transgenderism in youth increasesmental illness.
Professor John S. Grabowski’s in his recent book “Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference,” notes that “significant evidence reveals that aggressive hormonal and surgical transitioning procedures do not improve mental health outcomes for people who undergo them — even in ostensibly LGBTQ+ friendly cultures.” Moreover, postoperative transsexuals experience higher rates for psychiatric hospitalization, criminal conviction, and suicide, not to mention higher risk of mortality. In other words, confusing prepubescent fourth-graders or hormonal eighth-graders about their gender and sexuality may very well have lifelong detrimental effects on their emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.
It’s Not Just Biology, but English, Social Studies, Libraries…
If only it were in science classes that children are catechized in errant ideologies. An FCPS English teacher earlier this year read 10th-grade students a poem about masturbation (my 10th-grade FCPS English class, by comparison, read “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “Antigone”). School libraries promote trans content for elementary schoolers, including in picture books. FCPS prides itself on its libraries’ queer book selection.
And, of course, we cannot forget social studies, whose curricula have become beholden to racial ideologies pushed by the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Many Virginia schools have embraced the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” curriculum, while school districts across the country are using the 1619 Project’s social studies curriculum. That New York Times-originating project believes that America was “founded … on an ideal and a lie” as a “slavocracy,” and that “anti-blackness” is “at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.”
It depresses me to see what has happened in FCPS, and so many other school districts across the country. I am a product of FCPS, as are many of my extended family members. My mother and I worked in FCPS. It was once an impressive school system, one my parents trusted to offer me a solid, if secular, education. Now its leadership can’t even tell boys from girls. On what grounds should we trust them regarding anything else?
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and self-control. But the fruit of public libraries is faux diversity, drag queens, and rejection of the sexes — which is why the taxpayer-funded cesspools are “not interested” in giving Kirk Cameron a storytime slot to read his new children’s book on the fruit of the Spirit to kids.
The actor, writer, and producer “has not gotten a single ‘yes’ from the 50-plus public libraries his publisher has contacted so far,” Fox News reported in a Wednesday exclusive. According to Cameron’s publisher and Fox’s scouring of the libraries’ websites, “Many of the same libraries that won’t give Cameron a slot … are actively offering ‘drag queen’ story hours or similar programs for kids and young people.”
It’s not only drag queen story hours, where adult men derive pleasure from strapping on prosthetic breasts, painting theatrical contour all over their masculine faces, and sporting fishnet tights for an audience of children. These libraries reportedly host queer book clubs, a series called “Every Month Is Pride Month,” and so-called “get free help” events where attorneys and other volunteers help patrons fill out legal paperwork to change their names, record themselves as the opposite sex (or sexless entirely), and alter birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, IDs, and passports. But if you want to read to kids about gentleness, goodness, and kindness, it’s a hard no.
How does it go again? … Something, something “blessings of liberty”?
The self-important and self-appointed “principled conservatives” have expended much energy lecturing right-wing culture warriors who resist this debauchery. When conservatives took offense at libraries using their tax dollars to sponsor sexualized events that spit in the face of their deeply held religious beliefs, The Principled Conservatives™ were there with a finger wag and a condescending, First Amendment! Tsk! Viewpoint neutrality!
Drag queens reading to innocents is just one of those great “blessings of liberty,” went the spiel, and the right couldn’t possibly ban provocative cross-dressers from reading to kiddos in public spaces or else Christians would soon be banished from those same spaces.
Here’s a snippet from The New Yorker summarizing such an exchange from the debate between Sohrab Amari and David French (Mr. “Blessings of Liberty” himself):
Ahmari kept returning to the extremist complaint that Drag Queen Story Hours are being staged for children in public libraries. To him, these were a sign of “a five-alarm cultural fire.” … The same First Amendment principle that allows drag queens to read to children in public libraries had also allowed Christian groups to flourish, French said, by permitting them to organize in universities and other public spaces. “So, you would undermine viewpoint neutrality in First Amendment jurisprudence?” French asked. “Yeah, I would,” Ahmari said. French raised his arms in exasperation. “That’s a disaster, y’all!”
By “viewpoint neutrality,” French means the First Amendment’s right to free speech or freedom of religion applies evenly to different groups regardless of the viewpoints they espouse. But the idea that the American founders meant for the First Amendment to allow people to advocate for civilization-destroying behaviors is obscenely false. Nobody is morally obligated to be neutral about the gross immorality of discussing sex with other people’s kids, and the law should not be either, in theory or in practice.
Barring people from doing sex shows for kids in publicly funded venues is not against the Constitution, and it’s specious to argue that if you insist there are constitutional limits on speech and this is precisely one, that you’re somehow a proponent of “big government” or “against the free market.” There is no free market for children. And there are ways to establish reasonable and constitutional limits on speech — such as withholding government funding from events and venues that peddle books and activities about sex for children — something many conservatives are striving to do even if the self-described principled wing is too lazy or too cowardly to do that intellectual and ground-game work.
Furthermore, several years have now passed since the aforementioned “principled” prognosis, and the five-alarm cultural fire has consumed the public square; LGBT ideologues who have never cared about viewpoint neutrality dominate every government institution. If you haven’t noticed, drag queen story hours are only getting stronger, and Christians are still being barred from the public square.
Case in point: When Cameron’s publisher asked the Indianapolis Public Library about hosting a story hour with the author, a library employee replied that those types of events are “coordinated through our departments. We really have a push. We have a strategic plan in place, so we are really looking at authors who are diverse. Authors of color. That’s really been our focus.” And when the publisher countered that Cameron’s perspective contributes to a diversity of ideas, the library reportedly replied, “Well, we are focusing on racial equity.” In other words, the activists who staff government libraries work together to impose their cultural narratives and exclude those that are too white, too male, too straight, or too Christian.
At this point, the only way Cameron stands a chance of equal access to public libraries across the country is if he dresses up like a prostitute, gyrates around a reading room, and prods children to shove singles in his underwear.
The thing people like Cameron — or Jack Phillips or Barronelle Stutzman or Lorie Smith — understand but many establishment Republicans and “principled conservatives” don’t is that the left hates us and all the values we claim to be conserving. They don’t care about playing by a certain set of rules because their method is lawlessness (see: unpunished Black Lives Matter riots, brazen election meddling, illegal student loan bailouts, or unconstitutional vaccine mandates, to name a few). They scoff at viewpoint diversity because their aim is groupthink (consider: Big Tech suspensions for dissenters on a number of topics, or mass firings of health-care professionals who held unfavorable opinions about the jab). And they laugh at appeals to the First Amendment because they abandoned it long ago.
That’s why real conservatives groan when spineless Republican lawmakers drone about “robust” religious liberty protections in a tyrannical anti-speech bill promoting same-sex marriage. And it’s why they can’t bear to hear one more so-called conservative defend state-sponsored depravity with some appeal to “liberty.”
It should go without saying that conservatives should and do care more about the Constitution and other norms than their leftist counterparts, but there are indeed limits on the First Amendment. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
And the reality is that “The same First Amendment principle that allows drag queens to read to children in public libraries” is not “allow[ing] Christian groups to flourish,” as the Frenches of the world claim. It is not “permitting them to organize in universities and other public spaces.” After asking more than 50 libraries across the country to permit his Christian views, not a single one accommodated celebrity Kirk Cameron.
As my colleague John Daniel Davidson recently wrote in these pages, “[A]ccommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips. The left will only stop when conservatives stop them.”
Standing athwart history, yelling “stop” — or “viewpoint neutrality” or “free speech” — might have been enough to preserve liberty in the ’50s, but it’s almost 2023. If you want to know how well it’s working today, ask Kirk Cameron.
Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Loudoun County School Board Superintendent Scott Ziegler (Image Source: WUSA video screenshot)
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The Loudoun County School Board fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler following a grand jury report regarding the district’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by a biological boy who claimed to be transgender, Fox News Digital reported.
In May 2021, the skirt-wearing biological male student was accused of raping a 15-year-old female student in the girls’ bathroom. The story received national attention when the victim’s father, Scott Smith, accused Loudoun County School District of covering up the sexual assault to protect to its transgender policy. Following the horrifying attack, the biological boy was removed from the school and quietly sent to another school in the same district, where the student was accused of sexually assaulting another girl in October 2021.
The attacker faced charges and was found guilty of both sexual assaults.
Monday’s grand jury report stated that the district showed a “stunning lack of openness, transparency and accountability, both to the public and to the special grand jury.”
The report noted that the district “failed at every juncture.” According to the report, the school board attempted to “thwart, discredit and push back” against the grand jury’s investigation.
The grand jury slammed Ziegler for claiming at a school board meeting in June of last year that he did not have any knowledge of the first sexual assault and that there was no “record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” In that meeting, Ziegler also stated that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
The investigation into the district’s handling of the assault revealed that the superintendent was, in fact, aware of the initial assault. In a May 28 email, the superintendent alerted school board members about the reported attack.
Senior district officials subsequently met in private to discuss the sexual assault that occurred in the school bathroom, internal emails revealed. The report noted that LCSD “bears the brunt of the blame” for the second sexual assault and that it “could have and should have been prevented.” However, the grand jury did not find that there was a “coordinated cover-up” between school officials and the board.
“A remarkable lack of curiosity and adherence to operating in silos by LCPS administrators is ultimately to blame for the October 6 incident,” the report stated.
LCPS was provided with eight recommendations to increase school safety and avoid a similar incident in the future. The grand jury’s investigation did not result in any indictments.
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Parents Defending Education, a grassroots parental rights group, obtained and released a North Carolina school board presentation that detailed the district’s transgender policy, which explained how faculty should hide a student’s gender identity from the student’s parents.
On August 17, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District Board of Education met to view an 84-slide presentation that covered a wide range of topics, including student discipline, teacher salaries, and the district’s transgender policy. The presentation used CDC statistics to estimate that of the district’s 2,146 students, approximately 43, or 2%, likely identify as transgender. The school board also estimated that of those 43 transgender students, 15 had likely attempted suicide. According to district policy, children can request to change their names and pronouns without parental approval. Teachers are not permitted to share a child’s gender identity with the child’s parents or peers without express permission from the student.
“Preferred name can be changed at student’s request – parent/guardian consent not needed,” the presentation stated.
The policy asked educators to consider that a student’s parents may disapprove of the student’s gender identity, which could lead to abuse, neglect, dependency, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicide.
“There is never a justification for a policy that calls for the deliberate withholding and concealment of information from parents about their own child,” Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This policy is based on an ideology; it has no place in schools.”
Educators must refer to students by their preferred names and pronouns, although the policy noted that “inadvertent slips or mistakes” are excusable. However, when speaking to parents, teachers are instructed to use the student’s legal name unless the child has stated otherwise.
Students are permitted to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identities, the policy noted.
When going on field trips, educators are asked to “consider the transgender student’s privacy and comfort” and whether sex segregation is necessary. Teachers are also asked, “What will you do if you go to a place that enforces sex stereotyping?”
According to district policy, school staff must follow the students’ lead on the confidentiality of their gender identities.
“In deciding whether to involve a student’s parents or guardian in developing a plan, school staff should work closely with the student to assess the degree to which, if any, the parent or guardian will be involved in the process and must consider the health, wellbeing and safety of the student,” the policy stated. “Currently no duty for school to report transgender status to parents.”
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District Board of Education did not respond to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired Jim Baker, the company’s deputy general counsel, on Tuesday after an “unconvincing” explanation of the terminated employee’s role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
On Sunday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi posted a link to an article from attorney Jonathan Turley published in the New York Post which connected Baker’s work at Twitter with his prior operations peddling the Russia hoax at the Department of Justice. In 2016, Baker was the Clinton campaign’s “go-to, speed-dial contact” to plant false claims about Kremlin collusion and the Trump White House effort. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann picked Baker to give junk intelligence about a purported connection between President Donald Trump and the Russian Alfa Bank.
“He was effectively forced out due to his role and reportedly found himself under criminal investigation. He became a defender of the Russian investigations despite findings of biased and even criminal conduct,” Turley wrote. “After leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general counsel.”
The first batch of “Twitter Files” out on Friday revealed how Baker went on to play an instrumental role in suppressing blockbuster stories from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Biden family business ventures — stories containing emails that implicated then-candidate Joe Biden in the dealings.
“Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias that characterized the Russian investigations,” Turley wrote. Internal documents made public last week show Baker pressed colleagues at Twitter for more information that Biden’s emails had been hacked.
“Caution is warranted,” Baker wrote, despite there never being evidence the emails were illegally hacked.
Musk responded to Taibbi’s post on Tuesday with the announcement that Baker had been fired.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk wrote.
“Was he asked to explain himself?” inquired a user.
“Yes. His explanation was …unconvincing,” Musk replied.
In a “Twitter Files Supplemental” thread, Taibbi explained that last week’s delay in publishing the first round of files was due to Baker reviewing them without new Twitter leadership knowing.
“Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’ — without knowledge of new management,” Taibbi wrote.
The post suggests Baker was running interference behind Musk’s back to minimize the fallout over the reveal of Twitter’s behind-the-scenes operations to elect Joe Biden in 2020.
While general counsel at the FBI, Baker was central to the agency’s deep-state operations to undermine Trump as an agent of the Russian government. According to former FBI Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson in her testimony before House lawmakers in 2018, Baker “personally reviewed and made edits to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]” warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The ex-FBI counsel would later defend the agency’s conduct, telling Yahoo News that officials took “seriously” the uncorroborated dossier commissioned by the DNC that alleged collusion, but “we didn’t necessarily take it literally.”
The agency’s legal chief, however, took it seriously enough to sign off on warrants to spy on political opponents. At least two of the warrant applications to conduct government surveillance on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
A woman sits with her sign during a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) board meeting in Ashburn, Virginia, on October 12, 2021. | ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
Virginia school district administrators were “looking out for their own interests” and likely lied to parents as efforts to quell controversy ahead of the enacting of a transgender bathroom policy led to a preventable sexual assault, a special grand jury concluded in a report.
The grand jury entered the report in the Circuit Court of Loudoun County on Friday. The nine members of the special grand jury compiled the report at Attorney General Jason Miyares’ request for the grand jury to “investigate and report on any condition that involves or tends to promote criminal activity.”
Spokespersons for the Loudoun County School District wrote in a Tuesday statement to The Christian Post that the report’s criticisms against LCPS employees are “quite serious.” The next Loudoun County School Board meeting will involve a reflection on the report’s recommendations and “take action as determined by the full Board.”
Despite the criticism, the district is “pleased” the report found “no evidence of criminal conduct on the part of anyone within LCPS.”
“In a news release on January 15, 2022, Attorney General Miyares alleged that LCPS’ covered up a sexual assault on school grounds for political gain,’ the spokespersons wrote.
“To the best of our knowledge, this allegation was not true, and, after conducting an eight-month investigative process, during which it had the ability to interview any LCPS employee, Board member, and any other individuals beyond the LCPS community it deemed relevant, and during which it had access to virtually any LCPS record that was not otherwise legally privileged, the Special Grand Jury neither cited any evidence to support this serious allegation nor made any such conclusion in its Report.”
In its report, the grand jury described the May 28, 2021, sexual assault of a ninth-grade girl at Stone Bridge High School. The assailant, who reportedly wore a skirt, pinned the girl to the floor and assaulted her inside a women’s restroom stall.
A special education teacher later testified that she saw two pairs of feet inside the stall but did not interfere. She assumed someone needed help with a tampon or was being comforted after a breakup.
The assailant was still at-large three hours after the assault, according to the report. During this time, Principal Tim Flynn attempted to get a “no trespass letter” against the girl’s father after he arrived at the school and caused a commotion in the front office due to his daughter’s assault.
That evening, Flynn sent a note to families, offering counseling services to students who may have been disturbed by the commotion in the front office. The letter did not mention the sexual assault.
Loudoun Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler, his deputy superintendent, and his chief of staff were made aware the boy had sexually assaulted a student.
An arrest warrant was issued against the assailant two months later for two counts of forcible sodomy. The student was released within a few weeks and transferred to Broad Run High School.
Despite earlier reports that the student allegedly behaved inappropriately toward girls in his class, he received only a verbal warning.
On Oct. 6, 2021, the student grabbed a female student who walked him to class, placed her in a chokehold until she couldn’t breathe, and then sexually assaulted her.
“We believe that throughout this ordeal, LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS,” the grand jury report reads. “This led to a stunning lack of openness and transparency, and accountability both to the public and the special grand jury.”
While the report concluded there was no coordinated cover-up between LCPS and LCSB, with the exception of a May 2021 event, LCSB staff were “deliberately deprived of information” about the sexual assaults.
The special grand jury notes that LCSB learned from public reporting that the assailant in the October assault was the same as the one from May through public reporting and not the superintendent’s office.
According to the grand jury, the incident on Oct. 6, 2021, could have been prevented, but LCPS’s “lack of curiosity and adherence to operating in silos” allowed the assault to occur.
“While we strongly believe LCPS bears the brunt of the blame for the October 6 incident and the transfer of the student from SBHS to BRHS, a breakdown of communications between and amongst multiple parties — including the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, the Court Services Unit, and the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office — led to the tragic events that ocurred,” the report concluded.
The report made eight recommendations, including a reassessment of the student transfer process, improved communication across state agencies, and increased transparency.
As The Christian Post reported, the sexual assaults reportedly took place in Loudoun County while the school board considered the now-enacted policy 8040 to allow trans-identifying students to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.
The assailant allegedly wore a skirt when he assaulted his fellow student in the women’s restroom in May, as the student identified as “gender fluid.”
During a school board meeting last June, Ziegler assured parents concerned about the policy that “we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
In a Nov. 10 letter to Ziegler, Loudoun County Sheriff Michael Chapman asserted that the superintendent knew about the assault in contrast to his public proclamations.
“[D]espite a public statement at a School Board meeting on June 22, 2021, denying any knowledge of sexual assaults in any LCPS bathrooms, you sent an email on May 28, 2021, to members of the School Board advising them of the incident — thus invalidating your public statement,” Chapman wrote.
In the report, the grand jury agreed with the claim that Ziegler’s statement during the June school board meeting was a “bald-faced lie.”
“The superintendent later claimed he ‘was viewing the question in light of … policy 8040,'” the report reads. “Per the aforementioned Teams meeting, we know the superintendent learned shortly after the incident that the Stone Bridge assault was stated to be related to policy 8040.”
The grand jury’s report also called out the school board and district’s “lack of cooperation” throughout the investigation.
“We expected these public servants to provide clarity, transparency, and a willingness to report truthfully to their constituents. Instead, we were met with obfuscation, deflection, and obvious legal strategies designed to frustrate the special grand jury’s work,” the report states.
“From the outset the LCSB put up roadblocks to obstruct our investigation.”
A lawyer for the board chairman and superintendent submitted a motion to quash the grand jury’s subpoenas on grounds the state had exceeded its authority. But the motions were rejected in court. One teacher claimed that the lawyer tried to pressure her not to say anything to investigators.
“LCSB’s counsel consistently and repeatedly interrupted answers of his own witnesses when he felt certain information was about to be revealed,” the report added. “LCSB’s counsel consistently and repeatedly objected to questions that would elicit information about a meeting or conversation that occurred when LCSB division counsel was present — regardless of whether that meeting or conversation had anything to do with soliciting legal advice, or if division counsel was even a party to the meeting or conversation. Division counsel’s mere silent presence in a crowded room was enough for LCSB’s lawyer to claim the attorney-client privilege and instruct the witnesses not to answer the question.”
WASHINGTON — A new survey reveals that most Americans support religious liberty protections for medical professionals and institutions opposed to participating in procedures that violate their beliefs and commitment to “do no harm,” even as younger Americans express more skepticism about religious liberty protections.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty unveiled the top findings of its 2022 Religious Freedom Index at its headquarters Tuesday. The fourth annual survey, conducted in conjunction with Heart and Minds Strategies, is based on responses collected from 1,004 adults in the United States from Sept. 28 to Oct. 5. The full report is slated for release Wednesday.
As Becket Fund for Religious Liberty President and CEO Mark Rienzi explained, the Religious Freedom Index asks “the same questions year after year [to] a big number people to get a sense of how the American people are feeling about religious liberty for themselves, for other people, for people of minority faiths, [and] people of faiths that they don’t necessarily share.”
One question on the survey asked respondents to react to statements related to religious objections to assisted suicide, abortion and sex change procedures within the medical community. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed agreed that “individual physicians should be allowed to opt out of assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures” if performing such procedures goes against their religious beliefs or their commitment to “do no harm.”
When asked if they believed that “hospitals and healthcare systems which have ethical objections or are run by religious organizations should be allowed to refuse to perform elective abortions,” 62% answered in the affirmative. Additionally, a majority (59%) of those surveyed believed that “medical students should be able to opt out of instruction regarding physician-assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures during training.”
Only half of respondents expressed support for allowing “hospitals and healthcare systems with religious objections to assisted suicide, elective abortions, and sex change procedures” to “only employ medical professionals who agree with that position.”
Achieving 74% support, the most popular idea introduced in the Religious Freedom Index states that “Patients and families should have access to healthcare facilities that share their beliefs about controversial procedures such as assisted suicide, elective abortion, or sex change procedures.”
The release of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index comes after the Biden administration has found itself in court over a mandate it issued forcing medical organizations to perform gender transition surgeries. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down the mandate and the Biden administration did not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving the decision in place.
Last year’s survey included a question measuring support for “freedom for healthcare workers with religious objections to abortion to not participate in abortion procedures.” Seventy-five percent of respondents either completely or mostly accepted allowing healthcare workers to opt out of performing abortions if they could not do so in good conscience.
At the same time, 44% of those surveyed believed that hospitals and healthcare systems run by religious organizations should have the ability to “set policies and standards that reflect the organization’s religious beliefs.”
The questions about the conscience rights of hospitals and healthcare workers constitute a small fraction of the inquiries posed to Americans in this year’s Religious Freedom Index. As in previous years, the survey asked Americans for their views on religion and policy, religion in action, religion in society, religious pluralism, church and state and religion sharing.
Based on responses to a series of questions, Becket calculated a dimension score on a scale of 0 to 100 for each of the subcategories examined, with 0 indicating “complete opposition for the principle of religious freedom at issue” and a score of 100 demonstrating “robust support for the same principle.” The Religious Freedom Index is a composite score calculated after combining the dimension scores.
Heart and Mind Strategies CEO Dee Allsop elaborated on the dimensions examined in the Religious Freedom Index at the event Tuesday. According to Allsop, questions about religious pluralism examine respondents’ views about “freedoms to choose your religion, and to be able to pray and pursue your beliefs.” The religious sharing dimension measures Americans’ beliefs pertaining to the ability to “talk about and preach about your faith.”
Questions about church and state survey public opinion about “government being involved in religion and religion in government.” The religion in society dimension seeks to determine “whether or not religion is part of the problem or part of the solution” to societal problems.
The religion and policy dimension queries respondents for their views about marriage and whether or not religious beliefs “should be guiding the way that we vote.” The religion in action dimension is based on responses to questions about whether or not there should be “freedom for people of faith to follow their own religious beliefs when they’re at work and in their profession.”
As panelists explained at the press conference, the overall Religious Freedom Index stood at 68 this year, showing no change from 2021. However, the changes in the index dimension scores from 2021 varied widely.
As in previous surveys, respondents demonstrated the highest level of support for religious pluralism. The dimension score for religious pluralism came in at 84 in 2022, an increase from 80 in 2021. The dimension scores for religious sharing and religion in action barely budged from 71 to 72 and 67 to 68, respectively.
On the other hand, support for religion in society, religion and policy, church and state and religion in action declined compared to last year. The dimension score for religion and policy dropped by three points from 68 to 65 between 2021 and 2022. The religion in society dimension score also decreased by three points, from 65 to 62.
Mirroring the results of previous surveys, the dimension dealing with church and state received the lowest score in 2022, dropping from 58 to 56 over the past year.
A group of panelists, moderated by Becket Law Executive Director Montse Alvarado, discussed the findings from the Religious Freedom Index and their implications for American society as a whole at the event Tuesday. With the U.S. Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case in the news, Americans indicated that they “overwhelmingly support” the right of a photographer not to participate in a same-sex wedding if doing so conflicts with their religious beliefs, regardless of what those beliefs are.
The 303 Creative case centers on Colorado-based website designer Lorie Smith, who is challenging Colorado anti-discrimination law out of concern that it would force her to create websites for same-sex marriages in violation of her religious convictions about marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Oral arguments in the 303 Creative case took place Monday.
One panelist, Nick Tomaino of The Wall Street Journal, expressed gratitude for “the durable support for people like Lorie,” noting that the Religious Freedom Index found “about seven in 10 people thinking that Lorie Smith and others like her should be able to practice their faith.” At the same time, he highlighted a trend from the survey revealing that “Gen Z women aren’t registering their support.”
Other panelists also cited Gen Zers’ beliefs about religious freedom issues as a cause for concern going forward. Stephanie Slade of Reason Magazine pointed to statistics illustrating “abstract” support for religious liberty among the youngest Americans that fades when respondents are presented with a specific example: “Among Gen Z, you have a very high number (86%) who say … they support freedom of people or groups to choose not to participate in actions or work that violate their sincere religious beliefs and conscience.”
“When you put a specific example to them and you ask ‘should an individual physician, for example, be able to opt out of providing, say, being involved in abortion or physician-assisted suicide’ or something like that, support drops 50% among the Gen Z cohort,” she said.
Another panelist, Josh Good, director of the Faith Angle Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, attributed the hostility toward religious liberty among younger Americans to a “blind spot when it comes to religion” in American newsrooms. Tomaino suggested that having “religious practitioners in newsrooms” could help address this “blind spot.”
Tomaino contended that “there might be a caricature that newsrooms treat religion as something of a strange species.” Alvarado lamented the Religious Freedom Index’s finding that “37% of Americans had never heard of pregnancy centers being in any way being affected by post-Roe reality,” such as vandalism and bombings, as a consequence of media bias.
Alvarado and Slade suggested that had these people known about the targeting of pro-life pregnancy centers following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which determined that the U.S. Constitution did not contain a right to abortion, they would have become more sympathetic to arguments in favor of religious liberty.
“Story selection is a form of bias,” Slade asserted. “These stories are not getting the coverage that they deserve and they are not getting the coverage they would get if … when there are, in some cases, violence or any kind of harassment or attacks on an abortion provider, for example, these same journalists would know that this is a story and it deserves coverage and it’s a big deal.”
According to Slade, “In a healthy media ecosystem, we need people who are going out and just reporting the facts that are true.” She portrayed the current state of American media as focused on “the pure outrage-inducing opinion cable news-style journalism as opposed to reporting the facts,” where journalists see themselves on an “existential mission to represent the good against the evil.”
Slade also acknowledged that the irreligiosity of Gen Z compared to other generations might also play a role in their apparent hostility toward religious liberty: “Gen Z is much less religious themselves, they’re much less likely to think that religion’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”
“They’re much less supportive of freedom for people to run their businesses the way they want, for religious nonprofits to make employment decisions based on the tenets of their faith, which is a really important part of being a faith-based nonprofit, they’re much less likely to … support freedom to believe that certain behaviors are sinful.”
After Slade reiterated that Gen Z has “less sympathy and understanding of the value of religion in society,” Tomaino pointed to academic influence as a reason why. “The water they swim in universities tends to be overtly hostile to the faith,” he concluded. He circled back to the role the media plays in shaping public opinion: “Having news coverage of the positive contributions that faith organizations make is especially important.”
When Tomaino clarified that “males registered slightly more sympathy to religious causes” than females, Alvarado responded, “they’re more religious themselves.” Alvarado and the other panelists repeatedly stressed the importance of religious liberty in a pluralistic society, with the Becket Fund Executive Director sharing a quote from noted theologian Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “The Tree of Liberty has religious roots and don’t think that you can sever those roots and have the Tree of Liberty survive.”
For his part, Good offered up his opinion that “People being more religious, not less religious, is the key to understanding pluralism better.”
Discussing other takeaways of the 2022 Religious Freedom Index, Allsop noted that when asked if “religion is part of the solution to the problems we face in our society or part of the problem,” respondents were split down the middle. This constituted a dramatic drop from the 61% who saw religion as a solution to societal problems in 2021.
“Catholics in particular and non-Catholic Christians overwhelmingly say that they feel completely or a good amount accepted in our society,” he said. Stressing that feelings of acceptance were “not quite the same for those that are religious, non-Christians,” he reported that “less than half of them are feeling that high level of acceptance in our society.” Additionally, 89% of Americans agree that “sacred sites and religious practices of Native American Indians ought to be protected.”
When asked about the First Amendment, “Less than half of Americans recognize that freedom of religion is one of the protected rights in the First Amendment,” Allsop added. “Most Americans, even though they can’t find it in the First Amendment, they nevertheless feel that religious freedom plays a really important role and provides an important good in our society.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
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President Joe Biden last December warned of a “winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated.” But new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted a trend that would suggest that the greater share of COVID-19 deaths this winter will be among the vaccinated and boosted.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a nonprofit that focuses on health care issues affecting the nation, issued a report Wednesday analyzing recent CDC data — data that excludes the partially vaccinated. According to the KFF report, the “share of COVID-19 deaths among those who are vaccinated has risen.”
“In fall 2021, about 3 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted. But by January 2022, as we showed in an analysis posted on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, about 4 in 10 deaths were vaccinated or boosted. By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted,” said the report.
This decrease in the share of deaths from the unvaccinated crowd and the increase in the share of deaths from the vaccinated continued into the summer. In August, the CDC found that the unvaccinated accounted for 42% of COVID-19 deaths. Alternatively, individuals who had received the primary series of vaccines accounted for 22% of deaths, and those who received the primary series plus one or more booster accounted for 36% of deaths. Taken together, the vaccinated and boosted represented a 58% share of COVID-19 virus deaths in August.
On Nov. 23, Cynthia Cox, vice president at the KFF, told the Washington Post that this trend has been driven in particular by three factors: high-risk individuals being more likely to have received the shots; vaccines losing their potency over time; and more Americans having received the vaccines.
The KFF reported that another factor at play is “changes in immunity among the unvaccinated.”
The U.K. Health Security Agency noted in a March vaccine surveillance report that “people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19” previously. “This gives them some natural immunity to the virus which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks.” In addition, the report also suggested that new variants coupled with a drop in masking might lead to more deaths among vaccinated people.
Notwithstanding the reasons behind the trend, Cox concluded, “We can no longer say this a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Fox News Digital underscored how outgoing White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other medical experts had previously admitted that COVID-19 vaccines do not protect “overly well” against infection. Fauci, who is vaccinated and boosted but nevertheless caught COVID-19, stated in July that vaccines “don’t protect overly well, as it were, against infection” but “protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death.”
On Nov. 22, Fauci once again implored people in what might have been his last address from the White House podium to “get your updated COVID 19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community.”
About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”
He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.
I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?
The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.
Finding a New School
I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.
At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.
Building Real Identity
Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”
Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.
I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.
Open-Ended Questioning
Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.
If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.
When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.
In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.
I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
Limiting Technology
One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.
Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.
The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.
Upping My Parenting
Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.
This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.
I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra speaks outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., November 12, 2019. | SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
The United States Department of Health and Human Services has expressed support for using taxpayer funds to cover the cost of body mutilating “gender transition” surgeries for minors.
In written responses to Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said that the Biden administration supports using taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of elective body-deforming surgeries on youth, such as mastectomies and vaginoplasties. His responses were submitted Tuesday to the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor Tuesday.
Becerra responded to a series of questions inquiring as to whether the administration believes “taxpayers should pay for chemical castration and sex-change operations” and if “doctors should be forced to perform sex change operations on minor children without their parents’ consent.” He responded, “The Department follows the law, and is working to ensure that all patients, everywhere can access care free from discrimination, stigma and barriers.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration supports the upcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care Version 8 and believes that all children and adults should be afforded life-saving, medically necessary care,” he continued. “Payers, both public and private, should cover treatments which medical experts have determined to be medically necessary.”
Miller reacted to Becerra’s responses to her questions, published by The Daily Caller Wednesday, in a statement Thursday: “Biden’s HHS secretary has now confirmed that the Biden administration is using taxpayer dollars to push young children to have sex change operations and take dangerous chemicals that do permanent damage to their bodies,” she said. “The Biden administration even supports allowing these procedures to occur without parental consent.”
“American taxpayers should never fund puberty blockers and sex change surgeries on minor children,” she added. As Miller alluded to, Becerra also suggested that doctors should have the ability to perform sex change surgeries on minors without their parents’ consent.
In response to a question about whether doctors should be able to perform gender transition surgeries on minors in the absence of parental consent and a separate question asking if performing such procedures on children as young as 12 years old constituted child abuse, Becerra quoted from an HHS fact sheet titled “Gender Affirming Care and Young People.” Becerra’s reply did not answer the questions directly, instead insisting that so-called “gender affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare.”
“It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people. Gender-affirming care is patient-centered and treats individuals holistically, aligning their outward, physical traits with their gender identity,” the fact sheet, as cited by Becerra, explained.
In his response to Miller’s inquiry about whether gender transition surgeries on minors amounted to child abuse, Becerra prefaced his direct quotation from the fact sheet by stressing that “Medical care is between a patient, their family and their health care provider.”
He added, “The department is focused on ensuring that care is not stigmatized or denied based on a youth’s gender identity as consistent with the law.”
Becerra reiterated that “care is between a patient, their family and their health care provider” as he addressed Miller’s question about whether doctors should be able to perform sex change operations on children without parents’ consent.
Most of Miller’s line of questioning stems from the Biden administration’s newly released guidance that Becerra cited in his responses, which she described as “shocking.”
The guidance, compiled by HHS’ Office of Population Affairs, touts “gender-affirming care” for trans-identified youth as “crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.” It maintains that “medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth.”
Examples of so-called affirming care identified in the fact sheet include “puberty blockers,” characterized as the “reversible” use of “certain types of hormones to pause pubertal development,” and “gender-affirming surgeries” consisting of the creation of “male-typical shape” or “enhanced breasts” and/or “surgery on genitals or reproductive organs.”
Miller condemned the “gender-affirming care” promoted by the HHS as “dangerous chemicals” and “sex-change operations that permanently end their ability to ever have children.”
The American College of Pediatricians has listed “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility” as possible side effects of puberty blockers. It has also warned that cross-sex hormones can cause “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan.”
While the Biden administration declined to classify gender transition services for minors as a form of child abuse, the state of Texas has explicitly assigned that label to such procedures. Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters published a letter last summer stating that “genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.”
The state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a formal opinion earlier this year coming to the same conclusion, namely that gender transition surgeries for minors “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of” Texas law. Three other states have banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and/or genital mutilating gender reassignment surgery for minors using the legislative process: Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas.
Most recently, the Florida Boards of Medicine and Osteopathic Medicine voted to ban the prescribing of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children and body-mutilating “sex-change” surgeries for youth. President Joe Biden condemned state efforts to ban children from obtaining sex change operations as “wrong” during a presidential forum hosted by NowThisNews earlier this year.
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On November 14, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a federal investigation into an Atlanta elementary school following allegations made by a parent that the principal was segregating students into certain classrooms based on race, CNN reported. The Office for Civil Rights wrote in a letter obtained by the news outlet that it would investigate the accusations that Atlanta Public Schools subjected students “to different treatment based on race” and whether the district retaliated against the parent’s complaint. The investigation into the district was launched over a year after Kila Posey, a mother of two, filed a civil rights complaint against Mary Lin Elementary School.
Posey, a black woman, told CNN in a September 2021 interview that Principal Sharyn Briscoe, also a black woman, was segregating black children into certain classrooms. At the time, Posey explained that she discovered Briscoe had designated two of the six second-grade classes for black students when she requested that her daughter be moved to a particular teacher’s classroom.
In an interview with WSB-TV last year, Posey alleged that Briscoe responded by telling her that the class she wanted her daughter in was “not one of the black classes.” According to Posey, Briscoe said that her child would be isolated.
“First, it was just disbelief that I was having this conversation in 2020 with a person that looks just like me — a black woman,” Posey said. “It’s segregating classrooms. You cannot segregate classrooms. You can’t do it.”
According to the original complaint filed by Posey, the school’s assistant principal admitted in a recorded phone call that she was aware Briscoe had separated the students. In the recorded call, the assistant principal can be heard stating that “class lists are always tough” and that she wished more black children were attending the school.
Following the allegations, the head of the Atlanta Public Schools’ Office of Communications and Public Engagement, Ian Smith, told CNN that corrective measures were taken and that the matter was closed.
“Atlanta Public Schools does not condone the assigning of students to classrooms based on race,” said Smith.
Since then, Posey filed a second complaint against the district on August 29, 2022. Posey stated that she was fired from her position as an after-school care provider for the district. According to Posey, the termination was a “retaliation for raising the issue of segregation.”
Posey noted that she does not believe that the school has continued to separate students based on race.
“My understanding is that they had changed to some degree, but there were rooms that were not diverse,” she noted.
The district told CNN, “Atlanta Public Schools has received notice from OCR that a complaint was filed, and the district is following OCR’s process. Given that this matter is pending before a federal administrative agency for consideration, APS has no further comment.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
This video grab taken from a video posted on the Twitter account of billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk on October 26, 2022 shows himself carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit” and posted video of himself walking into the social network’s California headquarters carrying a sink, days before his contentious takeover of the company must be finalized. | Photo by Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images
Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk confirmed the suspicions of many conservative voices Wednesday after revealing that the social media platform “has interfered in elections.” Musk made the announcement in response to a Reuters report on Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who said the company was “not safer” after the billionaire business magnate acquired the company last month.
In what was billed as his first interview since resigning in November, Roth warned that the company no longer had enough staff to adequately perform safety work. In response to one commenter who said Twitter “has lost users’ trust” and that previous “trust and safety” personnel were a “disgrace,” Musk agreed and pledged to make Twitter “more effective, transparent and even-handed.”
“The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections,” he wrote.
Exactly. The obvious reality, as long-time users know, is that Twitter has failed in trust & safety for a very long time and has interfered in elections. Twitter 2.0 will be far more effective, transparent and even-handed.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 30, 2022
Earlier this week, Musk signaled that he would follow through with his pledge to make Twitter more transparent by releasing what he dubbed the “Twitter Files on free speech suppression,” adding, “The public deserves to know what really happened…”
The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
Roth made the comments that ultimately spurred Musk’s response while speaking at a conference hosted by the Knight Foundation when he explained why he tendered his resignation after initially supporting, at least publicly, Musk’s reform efforts.
“One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy … there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do,” he was quoted as saying.
Roth also admitted that Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop story at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign because the company was unable to confirm its veracity, according to Reuters.
In an interview with journalist Kara Swisher, the former Twitter division lead was quoted as saying: “We didn’t know what to believe, we didn’t know what was true, there was smoke — and ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.”
When asked whether the move was ultimately a mistake, Roth replied, “In my opinion, yes.”
In October 2020, just days before voters were to head to the polls, Twitter blocked users’ ability to share links to the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s now-notorious laptop.
The New York Times confirmed the laptop’s existence in March of this year in a report on the ongoing federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax filings.
Twitter’s censorship of the Post’s story also included blocking anyone with a large Twitter following from sharing it, CP reported in October 2020. The platform went so far as locking the personal account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany after she shared the article. Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who shared the article were also blocked on the platform. In response, the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who later confirmed the censorship and said it was “wrong” to block the story from being shared.
Since Musk’s takeover, a number of several high-profile accounts were reinstated by Twitter, including former President Donald Trump, The Babylon Bee, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Kathy Griffin and Project Veritas, among others.
CP, which had its account suspended in March after publishing a headline that described trans-identified Health and Human Services Secretary Rachel Levine as a man, has not yet been reinstated.
Inheritors of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s fortune have poured millions of dollars into LGBT activist organizations in Arkansas, helping to bankroll a number of propaganda events ranging from drag shows and story hours for kids to so-called “education” programs for sexually-confused youths.
In a recent report, Heritage Foundation research associate Gillian Richards scrutinized some of the causes that second- and third-generation beneficiaries of the Walmart patriarch’s wealth have patronized.
In June 2021, the Alice W. Walton Foundation and Olivia and Tom Walton, through the Walton Family Foundation, launched the Arkansas LGBTQ+ Advancement Fund.
Heather Larkin, president of the Arkansas Community Foundation, stated that this $1 million fund, which in turn confers grants of up to $150,000 to “LGBTQ-serving” nonprofits throughout the state, helps ensure that activist groups can “expand their impact on communities and help Arkansans pull together to build a more welcoming and supportive environment for us all.”
Richards noted that the Equality Crew is one beneficiary of the Waltons’ advancement fund.
This particular group established Arkansas’ confidential “Affirming Teacher and School Staff Database” ahead of the 2021-22 school year so that confused children could connect with teachers who would “affirm” their amorphous adolescent and teen sexual identities.
According to Richards, the Equality Crew hosted an event at the Walton Arts Center, which had a segment titled “Kids Zone,” featuring a “drag story time for younger children.” In another segment, titled “Teen Zone,” grade school students were treated to a “DJ, local band, and TWO drag shows.”
In another Equality Crew event that was set to take place at a public library, youth were invited to get “clothing from The Transition Closet” and to take part in a “teens-only dance party.”
The Transition Closet happens to be another Walton-funded nonprofit that provides “gender-affirming clothing and accessories for transgender and non-binary Arkansans.”
According to the organizers, the Equality Crew event was ultimately cancelled due to an “increasing number of violent and disruptive attacks on parents, children, and organizers seeking to serve members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
Richards reported that the Walton Family Foundation and the Walmart Foundation are both also leading sponsors of Northwest Arkansas Equality, an activist nonprofit based in Fayetteville.
According to the group’s website, “Northwest Arkansas Equality’s mission is to provide programs, education, and advocacy to serve, connect, and empower the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community.“
The NAE puts on various drag events.
The NAE proudly claims to have targeted kids with a number of its events, including drag brunches and “children’s storytimes.” Some of the group’s events featured so-called celebrities like drag queens Brian Michael Firkus (“Trixie Mattel”), Darius Jeremy Pierce (“Shangela”), and Ryan Taylor (“Trinity Taylor”).
The Walmart Foundation has been giving the NAE money since at least 2007 and has been filling the group’s coffers with the help of the Waltons as recently as 2020.
In addition to bankrolling LGBT groups, the Waltons have involved themselves directly in political battles regarding the advancement of the transgender agenda in Arkansas.
In 2021, Alice Walton, Tom Walton, and the Walton Family Foundation fought Arkansas’ “Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act” and failed. The proposed legislation passed despite a veto from Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
The act, now law, bans doctors from medically mutilating children and teens for the purposes of so-called “gender transition.”
The Capital Research Center, an American conservative nonprofit focused on charity and philanthropy, previously detailed Walmart’s long slide into woke philanthropy.
Sam Walton wrote “that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business,” not the least because it would amount to the company being charitable with other people’s money, particularly “shareholders or our customers.”
Nevertheless, the Walmart Foundation, created by Walton in 1982, reportedly tripled its expenditures on philanthropic donations between 1999 and 2005.
While the foundation largely gave to right-leaning think tanks in the early 2000s, facing criticism over being too capitalistic, it ramped up its funding of progressive and liberal causes in the 2010s.
The CPC indicated that the foundation soon was giving millions to leftist and leftist-adjacent organizations such as the New Venture Fund, FSG Inc., the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Meridian Institute, and others.
Soon, it was funneling cash into open-borders organizations like the National Immigration Forum and leftist identity groups like the Institute for Latino Progress.
Advocate, a gay activist publication, reported in 2016 that “Walmart has made an imperfect but nonetheless remarkable turnaround on LGBT advocacy,” trending from 14 out of a possible 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s so-called Corporate Equality Index to 90.
Now, just six years later, Walmart sits at first place on the index with a 100 CEI score, ahead of Amazon, ExxonMobil, and Apple. In addition to donating to groups pushing open borders, amnesty for criminal noncitizens, bigger government, and drag shows for children, Walmart also jumped on the BLM bandwagon.
In June 2020, amidst the George Floyd riots, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced that the Walmart Foundation and Walmart were committing $100 million to create a new center on racial equity.
While financially backing and systematizing identity politics, Walmart also embraced critical race theory. City Journal reported in October 2021 that Walmart employees were told that the U.S. was a “white supremacy system.”
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis announced Thursday that the state will begin pulling over $2 billion in assets from large investment manager BlackRock because of the firm’s environmentally and socially motivated investing standards.
Patronis said that BlackRock is choosing to use its money to pursue its ideology rather than secure profits for its clients, according to a press release. Florida’s State Treasury will begin to remove roughly $1.43 billion worth of long-term securities from BlackRock’s control as well as approximately $600 million worth of short-term investments managed by the firm. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: State Treasurer Who Took On BlackRock Plans Crackdown On Woke Investing As Congressman)
“Using our cash, however, to fund BlackRock’s social-engineering project isn’t something Florida ever signed up for,” Patronis said, according to the press release. “It’s got nothing to do with maximizing returns and is the opposite of what an asset manager is paid to do.”
The asset manager aims to push the world towards producing “net zero” emissions by 2050 and sees climate change as a severe financial risk, according to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s 2022 letter to executives. In August, 19 Republican attorneys general accused BlackRock of violating its duty to make money for its clients by allegedly boycotting fossil fuel companies.
Patronis claimed that BlackRock, which manages $8 trillion in assets, has used environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investing practices to decide which companies receive investment as well as influence societal outcomes in an “undemocratic” manner. The Florida CFO stated that he cannot trust BlackRock with the state’s money as he doubts the firm’s dedication to seeking a return on investment.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 30: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Larry Fink on stage at the 2022 New York Times DealBook on November 30, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New York Times)
“We are surprised by the Florida CFO’s decision given the strong returns BlackRock has delivered to Florida taxpayers over the last five years,” BlackRock said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Neither the CFO nor his staff have raised any performance concerns.”
Florida will have divested all its assets from BlackRock by the beginning of 2023 and transfer those assets to other asset managers. Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick withdrew $500 million worth of pension funds from BlackRock’s management on Oct. 18, arguing that the firm uses its control of pension funds to push a “left-wing” agenda.
“We are disturbed by the emerging trend of political initiatives like this that sacrifice access to high-quality investments and thereby jeopardize returns, which will ultimately hurt Florida’s citizens,” BlackRock stated. “Fiduciaries should always value performance over politics.”
The Florida CFO’s office did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Nov. 22 after it failed to complete a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into communication records regarding alleged online censorship during the 2020 presidential election.
The watchdog group was seeking communications between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision, and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an “information exchange” between researchers, election officials and government agencies established in 2020 to identify and research online misinformation leading up to elections that flagged social media posts for platforms to address. Judicial Watch demanded that the Washington D.C. District Court order the DHS to acknowledge the Oct. 5 FOIA request and “produce… non-exempt records responsive to the requests,” according to the lawsuit.
“We’ve had these disclosures essentially over the last year that federal agencies, especially DHS, hav been working to censor Americans… either directly or indirectly,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Through the EIP, multiple groups, including CISA and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, could file “tickets” reporting potential election misinformation, which EIP would then forward on to social media platforms after an investigation into the claims. The EIP released a 2021 report detailing its efforts to address misinformation in the 2020 election in which it acknowledged it had shared hundreds of posts with online platforms, with “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube […] either labeled, removed, or soft blocked.”
“This lawsuit’s designed to get into that. There’s these federal frauds that colluded to come up with a system of censorship for social media, and it looks like this [Department of Homeland Security] agency participated in it and we want to figure out what was going on,” Fitton said.
BREAKING: Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the DHS for all records of comms between the CISA, a division of DHS, and the EIP, which was created to flag online election content for censorship and suppression (1/3). https://t.co/xlJLtr8llL
Judicial Watch also requested records between CISA and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory, both of which were part of the EIP. The request specifically asked for communication about the 2020 election and “online misinformation and disinformation.” However, DHS allegedly failed to adhere to the Nov. 3 FOIA deadline, according to the lawsuit.
“When an agency unlawfully refuses to comply with FOIA, we have the option of suing the federal court, which is what we did,” Fitton told the DCNF.
House Republicans also launched an investigation into Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook about their role in online censorship. Amazon, Apple, TikTok and Microsoft are also under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, The Washington Times reported.
Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina reportedly made a request for all communication between the Biden administration and social media corporations pertaining to “digital censorship.”
“This is a threat to the first Amendment like we’ve never seen in modern history,” Fitton said.
The White House, DHS, CISA, the EIP, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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