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Posts tagged ‘First Amendment’

Facebook Has Admitted Its Error, But Its ‘Fact Checkers’ Are Still Complicit in Censorship


By: Mark Hemingway | January 08, 2025

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/08/facebook-has-admitted-its-error-but-its-fact-checkers-are-still-complicit-in-censorship/

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people.

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Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship policies and moving towards a “community notes” model for policing content like X. This includes terminating their “third party factchecking program” where the company paid legacy media organizations to “fact check” content on the site and then used those judgments to censor content.

At this point there’s little reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg can do much to atone for what he did to suppress speech and damage conservative publications. However, on the surface level this is a significant PR victory for free speech and, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s fact checking partners are not taking it well. Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact which is one of Facebook/Meta’s original fact checking partners going back eight years, just posted this defensive letter on X. Some of the highlights:

The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg could not be less subtle. …

Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and U.S. fact-checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. …

When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information. That’s how the information cycle is supposed to work.

If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror.

PolitiFact has been a thoroughly dishonest and contemptible organization since its inception, but this is a particularly dishonest and self-serving excuse, even for them. And I happen know what I’m talking about. After years of detailed reporting on the dishonesty of so called “fact checkers,” the publication I worked for, The Weekly Standard, made the decision to become, like PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s official fact checking partners. And I can tell you a few things about this arrangement that, if you care about free speech and journalistic integrity, will make your blood boil.

The first is that Facebook paid it’s fact checking partners for participating in this program — in PolitiFact’s case, Meta supplied more than 5 percent of their annual revenue. In practice, this meant that news organizations such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this program were taking a large sum from one of the country’s largest and most influential corporations. This was a massive conflict of interest, considering these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news. Which was a lot.

Already news organizations were skittish about Facebook because the death of print media and the subscription model meant they were heavily dependent on Facebook for steering traffic their way to make money on digital advertising. Taking money directly from Facebook meant they had you over a barrel in multiple ways. If there was cause to criticize Facebook’s policies about censoring content or any other matter, doing so meant these publications were biting the hand that fed them.

The second is that the inception of Facebook’s fact checking program was explicitly political and intended to suppress right-leaning news by design. Here’s an excerpt from Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by an author named Hemingway:

Soon after the [2016] election, BuzzFeed was reporting, “Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election last week.” The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump’s favor was “crazy.” Zuckerberg had already faced criticism earlier, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported, “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.”

By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged “fake news” that troubled Facebook’s left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to “fact-check” news on the site. With media revenue steadily declining — in no small part because Facebook had radically disrupted the traditional journalistic business models — once reputable news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program. Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print.

Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, much of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was about their inability to control American opinion.

Third, the idea that PolitiFact or any of Facebook’s media fact checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebook’s censorship and stifling free speech is such a dubious and offensive argument it’s incredible anyone would attempt to make it.

In the summer of 2018, the Weekly Standard’s participation in the Facebook’s fact checking program led to far and away the most awkward staff meeting in the eight years that I worked there. I wrote about this episode at length (and in this book), but essentially what happened is that the young journalist The Weekly Standard employed who wrote fact checks for Facebook openly said he was uncomfortable with the responsibility:

He explained that whenever he did one of his fact checking columns, part of his gig involved going into a special portal in Facebook’s backend created for its fact checking mercenaries, where he entered details about his fact check. When he entered a claim of “false,” he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he found the claim – at which point Facebook, according to their own press releases, would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn’t absolute. 

It was a record scratch moment in the staff meeting. After a beat, I spoke up and said something to the effect of “you mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to render judgment to nearly wipe a news story off of the internet?” Where our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media, it dawned on me — and more than a few others in the room — that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being leveraged to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world’s richest men. 

Suffice this anecdote to say, this all culminated in one editor at the magazine raising his voice — in defense of Facebook — in a way that made everyone in the room rather uncomfortable. Imagine you’re a writer at a conservative magazine and confronting the fact you’re participating in a program where a centi-billionaire pays a bunch of legacy media hacks to disproportionately censor politically inconvenient opinions on the right. I knew it was bad, but I was pretty alarmed to realize not all of my colleagues found this intolerable. But by this point The Weekly Standard was hemorrhaging subscribers and was shut down a few months later. Alas, the more animated editor in that meeting doesn’t appear to have learned from the episode.

After the closure of The Weekly Standard, alumni from that magazine started a new publication known as The Dispatch. Despite what had happened at our ill-fated previous employer, becoming a Facebook fact checking partner was one easy way for a new publication to get revenue, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t long before this new arrangement prompted controversy. A Dispatch fact check claimed two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List claimed “partly false information.” 

The allegedly false information was that the Susan B. Anthony List was claiming Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. It didn’t matter that this claim wasn’t even particularly debatable as Biden and the Democrat Party clearly support late-term abortion.

After a lot of online blowback — at the time, one of the marquee names at The Dispatch was David French, an alleged evangelical pro-life stalwart turned Kamala Harris voter — the publication promised to review and correct their error. Despite the public promise, you should not be surprised to learn that, either through negligence by The Dispatch or Facebook, the “process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information” touted above got no results. Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook in the critical weeks right before the 2020 election, which was decided by a mere 40,000 or so votes.

Mind you, this is all based on my comparably limited experience with a censorship program whose flaws were readily apparent to anyone. It would be impossible to muster enough contempt for an organization such as PolitiFact, who by their own admission did thousands of fact checks for Facebook to enable their direct censorship of ordinary citizens and important political voices alike.

Like I said, I find Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations suspect, to say nothing of the restitution he owes conservative publications like this one that told the truth only to be suppressed and censored. But regardless of how we arrived at this point, Facebook’s statement that what they were doing was wrong and the termination of their fact checking program are important concessions to the reality that ordinary Americans believe in and want free speech.

I imagine it’s hard to accept that you’ve been the villain all along, but Sharockman and PolitiFact don’t get to have it both ways. PolitiFact concedes they took Facebook’s money, but that doesn’t mean they share any responsibility for Facebook justifying censorship with the services they provided? No, PolitiFact knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebook’s gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.

We’ll see if Facebook follows through with its promise to be less censorious, but it’s impossible to read Sharockman’s hackneyed justifications without looking forward to the day where self-appointed fact checkers are irrelevant to what Americans are allowed to say.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Tim Walz Endorsed Censorship In Front Of Millions Of Americans And No One Cares


By: Mark Hemingway | October 03, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/03/tim-walz-endorsed-censorship-in-front-of-millions-of-americans-and-no-one-cares/

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The most important exchange in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media. Not surprisingly, that’s because it makes Walz look like an authoritarian and a fool in one fell swoop:

J.D. Vance: The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use …

Tim Walz: …[inaudible] threatening or hate speech …

J.D. Vance: … the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.

Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.

J.D. Vance: Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks.

CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell: Senator, the governor does have the floor.

Tim Walz: Sorry.

Ok, let’s unpack what happened here. Walz challenged Vance on Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the fate of democracy they wouldn’t be so adamantly pro-censorship. Specifically, Walz has previously said, quite incorrectly from any legal or moral standpoint, that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation.”

Walz interjects to, near as I can tell, try and clarify that he was also talking about limiting “threatening” words or “hate speech.” Interestingly, I looked at multiple debate transcriptions, and none of them had this quite audible interjection included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the part about “threatening or hate speech” is quite clear. In any event, to the extent that Walz is trying to defend himself he’s doing an awful job.

The legal standards for “threatening” speech or incitement might be clearer, but it’s still a fraught issue. As for “hate speech,” he has no idea what he’s talking about. You may not like it, but “hate speech” is absolutely protected speech. The First Amendment is absolutely a right to offend people without legal sanction, even gratuitously. Otherwise, policing speech is just a tool for government oppression. After all, who defines what constitutes “hate speech?” Walz seems to be suggesting he wants to throw people in jail for not using preferred pronouns and the like.

But the coup de grace for sinister ignorance is Walz saying, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” Now if you know anything about First Amendment issues, the “fire in a crowded theater” line makes civil libertarians break out in hives. Somewhat surprisingly, The Atlantic had a very good article a few years back about the origin of the phrase:

In reality, though, shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater is not a broad First Amendment loophole permitting the regulation of speech. The phrase originated in a case that did not involve yelling or fires or crowds or theaters. Charles T. Schenck, the general secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, was convicted in a Philadelphia federal court for violating the Espionage Act by printing leaflets that criticized the military draft as unconstitutional.

In a six-paragraph opinion issued on March 3, 1919, Justice Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court that Schenck’s conviction was justified because the leaflets advocated for obstructing military recruiting and therefore constituted a “clear and present danger” during a time of war. “We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights,” Holmes wrote. “But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

The rest of the article is worth reading for the full history, but in short, arresting people for handing out anti-war literature was justified by comparing it to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Which is unconscionable. Holmes himself later did an about-face on his own reasoning a year later, and the Supreme Court decision above was overturned by the court quite definitively by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. “Fire in a crowded theater” was never a reliable “Supreme Court test” as Walz put it, and it’s been totally inoperable as a matter of law since Walz was in kindergarten.

This is not some small matter here. I have no interest in defending what happened on Jan. 6 (though I do think a great many people have been subject to grossly unfair legal penalties for their participation in the riot, and that this has been done out of partisan spite). But Vance is absolutely correct when he says the Democrat Party’s embrace of censorship is far more threatening than anything on Jan. 6.

How do I know this? Well, to start, unlike Jan. 6, censorship has affected far more people and is an ongoing concern. This publication is involved in a lawsuit with The Daily Wire and the state of Texas against the State Department for promoting Big Tech censorship tools. The State Department justifies what they’re doing as part of a frightening attempt to police “misinformation” — which is routinely defined as any news that liberal academics and federal bureaucrats don’t think is politically expedient.

Earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, who knowingly spread lies about President Trump treasonously colluding with Russia to undermine a fairly elected president, sent a letter to tech companies telling them to censor “false, hateful, and violent content” because it is a “threat” to the upcoming election. But who decides what content is false, hateful, or violent here? Adam Schiff is an especially unworthy judge of these matters, but then again, there’s no elected official that should be deciding who gets to say what. And sending letters that attempt to intimidate private companies into preventing Americans from exercising their most fundamental constitutional right … well, perhaps we live in more civil times, but I have an idea of how the Sons of Liberty would have responded to such a politician.

And it’s not just politicians, the First Amendment is also being actively undermined by the people who, in theory, have the biggest stake in protecting it. Our corporate media’s silence is further proof they quietly agree that the censorship of unruly citizens is necessary. After all, if they continue to do things like refuse a vaccine that doesn’t actually prevent transmission of the disease, stubbornly point out the octogenarian the White House has dementia, and won’t vote for who they’re told to — how exactly do they expect journalism’s current business model to succeed?

The fact remains that fewer people are going to read this very article because it’s being actively suppressed by Big Tech right now. Even if I didn’t have the receipts to show that this publication was being intentionally and unconstitutionally singled out for suppression by the feds, just the fact I typed “vaccine” in the preceding paragraph was probably enough to alert The Algorithms such that this article will forever show up on page six of any relevant search results. The writer in me wants to note the twisted irony of an article warning about the obliteration of the First Amendment being actively censored; the citizen in me just understands this as simple tyranny.

Unlike so many of my peers — alas, I think my parents have taken to telling their friends I sell used cars to spare themselves the shame of admitting I’m a journalist — I’m not going to tell you how to vote. But it is entirely fair to say that Tim Walz and his ilk do not understand the First Amendment, and they sure as hell don’t respect it.

And when people like that get in power, we all lose.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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Under Tim Walz, Minnesota Banned Christians from Teaching in Public Schools


By: Joy Pullmann | August 27, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/27/under-tim-walz-minnesota-banned-christians-from-teaching-in-public-schools/

Tim Walz

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Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.

Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses. The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:

The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves (emphasis added).

Last spring, administrative law judges finally approved these pending changes The Federalist reported one month before they were finalized. Universities are also affected: starting in 2025, they must either train their teaching students to fulfill these anti-Christian requirements or be banned from offering state licensing — and thus the ticket to the vast majority of teaching jobs — to their students.

Since 2020 in Minnesota, teachers renewing their licenses, which is usually required every five to seven years, must demonstrate “cultural competency” similar to the requirements imposed in 2025 on new teaching licensees. Teachers renewing their licensing must “Show[] evidence of self-reflection and discussion of” topics that include “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students” and “Sexual Orientation.” They must also show they understand “bias” in themselves, and their students related to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other cultural Marxist categories.

Queer Totalitarianism Forces Religion into the Closet

Some Christian universities in the state will obey these regulations, said Doug Seaton, founder and president of the nonprofit Upper Midwest Law Center, located in Minneapolis. Some Christian universities will not, but so far, those UMLC has reached out to that plan to disobey these state commands to violate their faith will do so quietly and only sue when the state finds and punishes them, Seaton said.

“Some are not willing to do it [file a lawsuit] until they actually have their college programs tagged for noncompliance, or their graduates actually not licensed as a consequence of not adhering to these standards,” he said in a phone interview. This comes even though UMLC, as a public interest law firm, would undertake the litigation and pay the vast majority of its expenses thanks to their donors. Three Minnesota Christian Universities The Federalist reached out to did not return inquiries on whether they would enforce the new licensing rules.

Faithful members of the world’s largest and oldest religions cannot in good conscience “affirm” non-heterosexual sexual orientations and gender identities. Christians who do so publicly deny their faith, something Jesus Christ said endangers a person’s soul and eternal bliss after death: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).

Minnesota’s teacher requirements therefore force Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents to other religions to violate their faith and endanger their hopes of eternal life in order to work in government-run schools.

Forcing people to testify to beliefs they don’t hold, often called compelled speech, is clearly unconstitutional, he said: “They’re essentially requiring people to affirm these ideas that they don’t really believe, in many cases, as a condition of being a public-school teacher or being part of a program to be a licensed public-school teacher. You can’t force that kind of speech; you can’t require adherence to ideas that aren’t believed.”

The 13-member board that made these changes is appointed by the governor, whom for the last six years has been Walz. So, Walz is poised to make similar bigoted, totalitarian, and unconstitutional policies across the United States should he be elected vice president.

Marinating Kids in Anti-American Propaganda

As I reported last year, Minnesota’s new teacher requirements also “require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs.”

“For example, Standard 6C requires that ‘The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.’” That “standard” remains in the latest version of the regulations, under the same number.

Recently in The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Kersten examined curricular changes Minnesota is making under Walz’s administration in “ethnic studies” that mirror these changes to teacher licensing requirements.

Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to ‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’

Fourth graders must ‘identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.’ High-school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.”

The new teacher requirements are also rife with demands to agree with race Marxism, as Child Protection League analyses detail. Below are just a few examples.

Walz’s first executive order as governor was to install a “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, council. Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist notes that “The radical Walz administration Department of Human Rights has also forced school districts to report student discipline by race and require equal outcomes (equity) in discipline. The results have been horrific chaos and violence.”

During Walz’s governorship, student achievement in Minnesota has gone from among the best in the nation to declining more sharply than anywhere else in the nation, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for the American Experiment. The most recent scores show Minnesota fourth graders dipping below the national average in reading for the first time ever recorded on the well-respected Nation’s Report Card.

Research has found for decades that there is no link between teacher certification and student achievement. People who enter teaching with a degree other than in education tend to have significantly higher personal and student academic performance.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Culture, Education, Political

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Free Speech Fight Will Go on After Supreme Court’s Devastating Ruling


BY: M.D. KITTLE | JUNE 27, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/27/free-speech-fight-will-go-on-after-supreme-courts-devastating-ruling/

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Free speech may have taken a beating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling giving Big Government and Big Tech free rein over the First Amendment, but an attorney for the private plaintiffs in the case says the battle is far from over. 

“We are not giving up. … We are pursuing it on the merits … in the district court, and we want to get more discovery,” Jenin Younes, litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance tells me in the latest edition of “The Federalist Radio Hour” podcast.   

NCLA represents the private plaintiffs in the ruling that saw a 6-3 majority in Murthy v. Missouri reverse a lower court’s injunction that blocked the federal government from partnering with social media giants to silence posts it doesn’t like. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood wrote, the decision — based on an absurd standing argument — effectively frees the Biden administration to continue its censoring operations during the 2024 election. 

“The Supreme Court majority has practically erased the First Amendment and permitted government to co-opt private entities, like social media platforms, to accomplish its censorship aims,” NCLA said in a press release following the ruling. 

In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the plaintiffs failed to establish standing because they did not “demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek.”

“Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” the decision opines. 

‘Truth Can Get You Fired’

But if the past is truly an indicator of the future, it’s difficult to reconcile the standing argument with the speech suppression that occurred, particularly against those who rightly questioned the government’s Covid policies and voiced legitimate concerns over Covid vaccines. 

NCLA’s clients, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines, were all censored for daring to challenge the government’s “disinformation” campaign on the pandemic. It cost Kulldorff his job as a respected professor at Harvard. 

“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story — a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic,” he wrote earlier this year in a column for City Journal. Kulldorff had questioned the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. 

‘Factual Errors’

No one was hurt by the government? The majority opinion asserts that while the Big Tech speech suppressors did have content moderation policies and may have been censoring users, the plaintiffs provided no documentation showing the government coerced the social media giants to do so. As censor-in-chief Joe Biden would say, that’s malarkey. 

Younes said the ruling is rooted in some “factual errors” by the majority. The Louisiana District Court Judge who on July 4, 2023, issued the injunction against the government said the executive branch “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty conducted a thorough review of voluminous records showing dozens of agencies communicating with Big Tech companies, according to Younes.

“[There were] probably close to 100 federal officials that we know of who were colluding with, coercing, pressuring, influencing the companies to effectuate their censorship desires,” the attorney said, adding that the justices in the majority appear to have “read the government’s brief and just believed everything they said.” 

In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito warned that the government’s conduct was “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.” 

“Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”

Difficult but Not Impossible 

While the high court remanded the case to the lower court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” Younes said expanded discovery might just stop the overreaching government yet. NCLA plans to go after government and Big Tech communications involving its clients to show the direct harm caused, as demanded in the majority’s standing argument. 

“The district court has shown that it believes in our case and … said this is arguably the most massive attack on free speech in the history of the United States, which I agree with,” Younes said. “The federal government was censoring entire narratives, entire lines of thought. If you questioned the efficacy of the vaccines in 2021, even if you were a vaccine expert like our client, Martin Kulldorff, you would be censored on social media, as he was.”

The case may also get an assist from a presidential candidate. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now running as an independent, had sought to intervene in the Supreme Court case but was turned back by the majority. If anyone knows censorship, it’s RFK Jr., who was blocked from social media as part of what the government and corporate media have described as the “Disinformation Dozen” for challenging the government’s faulty narrative on Covid vaccines. Kennedy has lots of emails showing the Biden administration trying to silence his speech. 

As government water carrier USA Today reported, one email shows the Biden administration pouncing after Kennedy suggested baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death may have been caused by his Covid-19 vaccine. 

“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the digital director for the White House’s Covid response team wrote in an email to an official at Twitter, the publication reported. 

Alito also dissented in the court’s rejection of Kennedy’s motion to join the lawsuit, suggesting standing could be a problem and RFK Jr. could help take away that argument. 

“[The Supreme Court is] making it very difficult to bring the case, but they’re not making it impossible,” Younes said.

If the Supreme Court won’t stand up to assaults on the First Amendment, Congress must, said plaintiff Jill Hines, NCLA client and co-director of Health Freedom Louisiana.

“After reviewing the shocking and incriminating evidence indicating a massive government censorship scheme, the Justices erroneously determined to allow the government access to social media companies for the purpose of undermining free speech,” she said in the press release. “Congress must act immediately to defund agencies and third parties actively involved in this broadly pervasive and unconstitutional censorship scheme.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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The Ten Commandments Should Be Taught In Classrooms, Not Just Hung On The Wall


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JUNE 21, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/21/the-ten-commandments-should-be-taught-in-classrooms-not-just-hung-on-the-wall/

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Louisiana made news this week for passing a law that mandates the Ten Commandments be displayed on the walls of every public-school classroom, including elementary schools, middle and high schools, and all public college classrooms.

The law defies a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a similar law in Kentucky, so this is certain to be challenged in court — a prospect supporters of the legislation are counting on. “I can’t wait to be sued,” said Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who has been rather open about one of the purposes of the law: to challenge Supreme Court precedent on the First Amendment, specifically regarding the establishment clause, which for the past half-century has been used to excise nearly all formal recognition of religion from America’s public schools.

As a vehicle for challenging bad precedent, the law seems sufficient. But another purpose for it, at least according to Landry and other Republicans, is to instruct and mold students. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” the governor said, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. The idea that posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms will do anything to inculcate in students a respect for the rule of law, to say nothing of basic morality, is pure fantasy. You might say it’s necessary but not anywhere close to sufficient.

If you want to teach students to respect the rule of law and understand that just laws are based on objective moral standards, then you’re going to have to do more than post the Ten Commandments. You’re going to have to get to the root cause of why these things are not taught in public schools anymore — in fact the opposite is taught, that objective morality is oppressive and that the rule of law is systematically racist.

That means you’re going to have to do something about the teachers and administrators. It’s no secret that public school teachers all over the country tend to be far more left-wing than the average American and that no matter how small or conservative your community might be, its teachers and librarians and public-school administrators are among the most radical people in it. They are supported by powerful teacher’s unions and come out of an education and credentialing pipeline that exists to put left-wing ideologues in classrooms and school bureaucracies.

If you really want students to learn about the importance of the Ten Commandments — to say nothing of Christianity, Western philosophy, or the American founding — then you’d better be ready to take on the teachers’ unions and dismantle the teacher’s colleges and credentialing programs.

All of those things are of course well within the mandate of state legislatures. If the GOP-controlled Louisiana legislature has enough votes to mandate the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom in the state, surely, they have enough votes to shut down the teacher’s colleges and repeal the laws requiring that every public-school teacher be credentialed from such colleges.

It’s all well and good to pass laws with a view of changing Supreme Court precedent on establishment clause jurisprudence, but that doesn’t really strike at the root of the problem. Even if the Ten Commandments are allowed to remain on the walls of Louisiana classrooms, students aren’t going to learn anything about them unless they’re taught by teachers who themselves understand the importance of the Ten Commandments.

Therein lies the problem. The institutions that were once supposed to safeguard our education system have been taken over and transformed by leftist radicals who hate the very things we need them to teach our students — like respect for the rule of law or what the Ten Commandments are and where they came from.

What can be done about this? Plenty. Conservatives who actually care about such things are in the minority in America. They don’t wield a lot of institutional power. But Republicans, who count at least some conservatives among their ranks, currently control state legislatures and governors’ mansions (trifecta control) in 23 states. If the GOP in those states really wanted to fight back against the left’s control over public schools, it could push for the abolition of teachers’ colleges, or of credentialing requirements, or change them so that public school teachers need not be indoctrinated in Marxist ideology to teach in a Republican-controlled state.

And of course, much more than just that could be done — if the right wanted to fight back. The key thing is getting over this idea that we must preserve at all costs an outdated and fundamentally flawed notion of neutrality in our public institutions, that public schools, for example, must be silent about religion and morality even as they indoctrinate students in what amounts to a new religion of leftist political activism, bombarding them with lessons derived from critical race theory and LGBT ideology.

The left obviously doesn’t care about neutrality. Every institution and public space they are able to control is immediately used to push a very non-neutral message and agenda. Conservatives are the only ones who even pretend to care about neutrality anymore. It’s time to change that. Neutrality has always been a luxury good that only a religiously and culturally homogenous society could afford. Once the left weaponized it as part of a campaign to take over institutions, it became folly to adhere to it.

And yet most Republican officeholders still do. They should stop and get serious about getting the Ten Commandments back in public school — in the curriculum, not just posted on the wall.

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. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Minnesota Human Rights Act Openly Attacked Religious Freedom


BY: RACHEL PIAZZA | JUNE 20, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/20/minnesota-human-rights-act-openly-admits-to-attacking-religious-freedom/

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In 2023, the legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) to add anti-discrimination protections for “gender identity” but failed to revise the corresponding religious exemption, effectively attempting to remove it.

This year, “gender identity” was added to a list of already protected categories of protections in the MHRA. “Sexual orientation” was already protected by the MHRA, but the term “gender identity” was added explicitly. A religious exemption that had already been in place since 1993 “prohibited the state from forcing religious organizations to comply with the anti-discrimination law provisions with respect to protected categories like sexual orientation when those provisions are inconsistent with a religious organization’s sincerely held beliefs,” said Renee Carlson, general counsel for True North Legal. However, the religious exemption was not updated to include the term “gender identity.”

“While we had hoped it was an oversight, the House Judiciary Chair stated on the record that the omission of those words was intentional,” Carlson said. “A discussion ensued during the committee where Democratic legislators not only refused to accept an amendment to protect religious organizations, but also called the amendment to protect religious organizations ‘disturbing’ and ‘disgusting’ after hearing a testimony from a diverse group of testifiers.”

By openly failing to include “gender identity” in the previously established religious exemption, the Minnesota legislation openly attacked religious freedom, but the attack does not stop there. Churches and religious institutions would be directly impacted by this exemption, but so would many unprotected groups served by religious organizations.

“A threat to religious organizations extends well beyond the churches and ministries that the statute protects. Religious organizations often serve marginalized and underserved communities, such as victims of sex trafficking, homeless families, and youth through programs that help kids graduate high school and even go to college. These religious entities in Minnesota meet individual needs and fill gaps that the government could never achieve on its own. To be sure, this was an unprecedented attack on religion and people of faith, but also on the communities that they serve,” said Carlson.

The MHRA could even threaten the existence of some religious organizations whose mission and religious beliefs are inseparable, Carlson added. “For religious organizations and its members, every decision is inextricably bound up in the tenets of its faith tradition. Removing statutory protections for religious organizations from the Minnesota Human Rights Act threatened the existence of all religious entities whose missions are inseparable from their employment practices, catechisms, and governance.”

According to Jason Adkins, general counsel at Minnesota Catholic Conference, the religious exemption was put in place in 1993 and had functioned without any problems until the bill introducing “gender identity” protections. The religious exemption was never meant to compromise anti-discrimination law but was intended to protect the freedom of religious institutions.

“The clear religious exemption provides predictability to religious organizations, potential litigants, and others about the scope of the MHRA and the pluralism of values that it protects, including the autonomy of religious institutions on matters of sexual identity. Anti-discrimination provisions related to sexual orientation and gender identity made it into law in 1993 in part because religious groups did not oppose them due to the inclusion of the exemption. This clarification of law restores the gender identity exemption and ensures that the MHRA is not used as a sword against faith communities,” said Adkins.

After public backlash, both the Minnesota House and Senate voted unanimously to restore religious protections.

While the restoration of the exemption somewhat protects religious organizations, there are many members of religions working in fields not controlled by religious institutions. Christian workers, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors, fear the need to compromise their religious beliefs in order to do their jobs in a way that respects the MHRA. “Our big concern is that doctors may be punished for declining to provide treatments they believe are unethical or harmful. This is not a tenet of a specific religion, but of natural law and universal human rights,” said a medical doctor from the Association of American Physicians. 

Despite the religious exemption being restored, legal battles to defend religious freedom are constantly raging in Minnesota. Still in effect are the new standards requiring state-licensed teachers to affirm students’ gender identities. After the MHRA tried to effectively remove the religious exemption, new amendments to the Minnesota constitution intending to attack religious institutions have been proposed.

Doug Seaton, a lawyer at Upper Midwest Law, emphasized the constant need for vigilance in an environment where religious liberty is always under attack. “We have to be constantly fighting these assaults in the dark and bringing them to the light. This attempt ended in success, but it is a lesson in how eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

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Louisiana Expands Education Choice to All


By: Jason Bedrick | June 19, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/19/louisiana-expands-education-choice-all/

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry—seen here March 18 outside the Supreme Court speaking with reporters after justices heard oral arguments in a First Amendment case—on Wednesday signed an expansive Educational Savings Accounts bill into law. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

Education freedom is on the march.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry on Wednesday signed legislation making the Pelican State the 16th state in the nation to enact K-12 Education Savings Accounts and the 11th to offer education choice to every K-12 student, following Alabama earlier this year.

The legislation creates the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise—LA GATOR—Scholarships, which families can use to choose the learning environments that align with their values and work best for their kids. As with other ESA policies, parents can use the LA GATOR Scholarships to pay for private school tuition, textbooks, curricular materials, special-needs therapy, and more.

“The LA Gator Program puts parents in the driver’s seat and gives every child the opportunity for a great education. When parents are committed to the value of their child’s education, government should never get in the way,” said Landry, a Republican. “School choice is now a reality in the state of Louisiana!”

Most students will be eligible for scholarships worth about $5,200 annually, which is just over a third of the average per-pupil spending at Louisiana district schools. Students with special needs and children from low-income families can receive higher scholarship amounts.

The scholarships will initially be limited to students who are switching from a district or charter school, are entering kindergarten, or who are from families earning no more than 250% of the federal poverty level. In the second year, families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty line will be eligible, and in the third year, the scholarships will be open to all K-12 students in Louisiana.

More than a quarter of K-12 students nationwide are currently or soon will be eligible for a publicly funded education choice policy. Including privately funded tax-credit scholarship policies, more than 36% of students nationwide are eligible for a private education choice policy.

The new scholarship policy is an example of how the school choice movement has moved in a more free-market and family-centric direction. Instead of relying on bureaucrats to provide top-down accountability, the new policy trusts parents to provide bottom-up accountability.

The LA GATOR Scholarships will replace the state’s overregulated school voucher program, which produced the nation’s first negative results in a random-assignment study on the effects of a school choice policy on participating students’ academic performance.

“Equalitarian” regulations intended to guarantee access and quality—such as open admissions requirements, price controls, and mandating the state test—backfired by chasing away high-performing private schools.

Fortunately, Louisiana lawmakers have learned from their state’s own mistakes, as well as the success of states such as Arizona and Florida, which have shown that a free-market approach to education does a better job of providing a high degree of access and quality. The new scholarship policy eschews the harmful regulations of its predecessor.

Louisiana’s embrace of universal school choice also shows the success of efforts by conservatives to channel parents’ frustrations over “woke” ideology in traditional public schools into public support for policies that empower parents to choose schools that align with their values.

“Our people seek government that reflects their values,” said Landry during his Jan. 8 inauguration. “They demand that our children be afforded an education that reflects those wholesome principles, and not an indoctrination behind their mother’s back.”

The same week that the Louisiana Legislature gave the green light to the LA GATOR Scholarships, it also approved legislation curbing the ability of “woke” teachers to indoctrinate students in radical gender ideology behind parents’ backs.

Similar to Given Name Act policies in other states, Louisiana’s HB 121 would prohibit public school employees, including teachers, from referring to children by pronouns that are inconsistent with their sex, or any name other than the student’s legal name or common derivatives thereof.

Too often, school officials have begun the process of “socially transitioning” confused children all while keeping their parents in the dark. Going forward, Louisiana schools will no longer be able to subvert and supersede parents by making decisions concerning their children’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being without their knowledge and consent.

Another bill, HB 122, restricts discussion in government-run schools about sexual orientation and gender identity “in a manner that deviates from state content standards or curricula developed or approved by public school governing authorities.”

The bill properly recognizes that public school teachers are not free agents, but rather public employees hired by the public to perform a particular job. Parents and the public at large expect teachers to carry out the job they were hired to do without exploiting their position to indoctrinate a captive audience of children in a radical ideology.

Louisiana’s school choice win is also evidence that advocates’ short-term hyperpartisan strategy will pay bipartisan dividends in the long term. If Republicans gain an electoral advantage over Democrats by embracing school choice, eventually the Democrats will have to embrace school choice, too. We’re already seeing the signs in places like Louisiana.

When the Louisiana House of Representatives on April 8 passed the bill to create the LA GATOR Scholarships, the vote was 71-32, including six Democrats. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s one-fifth of the Democratic caucus. Moreover, whereas bipartisan efforts to advance school choice legislation typically involve bills to create small, targeted, and overregulated policies like the one the LA GATOR Scholarships are replacing, these Democrats voted for a Republican-led effort to enact education choice for all.

There’s still a long way to go. After all, most of the Louisiana House Democrats and all the state Senate Democrats voted against school choice. But as education choice policies become the norm and not just the exception, it will be increasingly difficult for members of any political party to stand in their way.

Related Posts:

  1. Missouri, Nebraska Advance Education Freedom
  2. Parents’ Involvement Called Key to Keeping Leftism Out of Schools
  3. Heritage Foundation Chief Urges Abolishing Federal Education Department

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Court Rules Schools Can Force LGBT Ideology on Kids Against Parents’ Religious Objections


BY: CHAD FELIX GREENE | MAY 21, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/21/court-rules-schools-can-force-lgbt-ideology-on-kids-against-parents-religious-objections/

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In a growing environment of left-wing activism in schools, especially related to LGBT ideology, parents who have not been able to influence curriculum have had the option of opting their kids out of classes. Not any longer, at least according to a federal appeals court in a Maryland case of three families suing for the right to religious freedom for their elementary school-aged children in public schools.

In August of 2023, three families — one Muslim, one Christian, and one Jewish — brought a case against the Montgomery County Board of Education for a recent policy change removing the opt-out option for curriculum. Previously, parents received advanced notice of materials that would be read to their children and could opt out. The school board announced that parents would no longer receive advanced notice of materials, and they could no longer opt out of readings or lessons.

A year prior, according to the case, “In the spring of 2022, the School Board had determined that the books in its English language arts curriculum were not sufficiently representative because they did not include LGBTQ characters.” Maryland law requires schools to give parents the opportunity “to view instructional materials to be used in the teaching of family life and human sexuality objectives.” The school board also has an opt-out policy for religious exemptions in place.

However, there is a clause that states that “if such requests become too frequent or too burdensome, the school may refuse to accommodate the requests. Schools are not required to alter fundamentally the educational program or create a separate educational program or a separate course to accommodate a student’s religious practice or belief.” Deciding that LGBT inclusion in the curriculum was fundamental to the educational program and the requests were too burdensome, the school board simply declared parents could not opt out of LGBT content any longer.

Judge’s Ruling

Last week, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman dismissed the parents’ concerns and noted that every court that has reviewed similar mandatory public-school curricula has found that “mere exposure in public school to ideas that contradict religious beliefs does not burden the religious exercise of students or parents.”

She insisted, “The parents still may instruct their children on their religious beliefs regarding sexuality, marriage, and gender, and each family may place contrary views in its religious context.”

“No government action prevents the parents from freely discussing the topics raised in the storybooks with their children or teaching their children as they wish,” Boardman wrote in Thursday’s order.

The decision was upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their reasoning was that the parents could not demonstrate how the LGBT-themed books would be used in the classroom and therefore could not determine if they would infringe on their beliefs.

Contrary to the First Amendment

Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argued, “That runs contrary to the First Amendment, Maryland law, the School Board’s own policies, and basic human decency.”

“Parents should have the right to receive notice and opt their children out of classroom material that violates their faith,” he added.

In contrast to the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, reviewing the Montgomery County Public Schools website makes it clear why these books are in the classroom. The website has a dedicated LGBT section stating, “We have welcoming, affirming schools, classrooms, teams, and clubs. We value all of our children, youth, teachers, staff, and parents.” The section provides an extensive list of LGBT content, resources, and “How to” guides for students, staff, and parents.

Students are provided a Coming Out as YOU! guide that instructs them on how to come out, including a “safety plan,” which tells the students to make sure they have a safe place outside their home to stay; someone, seemingly besides their parents, that they can trust; and to “Consider letting a friend know that you’re planning on coming out and if you don’t text them by a certain time you might need help because your safety might be in danger.” The guide tells students they should decide what they identify as daily, which can change day by day.

The school’s Culturally Responsive Supplemental Elementary ELA Collection is the biggest concern point for parents, as it details the content students will be provided. Students grades kindergarten to second grade are provided more than eight separate LGBT titles, half of which are trans-focused. One book, titled Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, states in its description, “Penelope knows that he’s a boy. (And a ninja.) The problem is getting everyone else to realize it.”

Three books focus on a character named Max, a transgender-identifying elementary school-aged student who dedicates time to educating friends, teachers, and parents about what being transgender means. Several books are focused on same-sex relationships: one about a prince and a knight who fall in love, one about a child’s gay uncle getting married, and a book for 4- to 8-year-olds titled Love, Violet, about an elementary-aged girl who falls in love with another girl.

Not being subtle, another title for this age group is IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All, a book on intersectional feminism that teaches kids how to be activists, and a book titled Let’s Eat Bugs! for fifth graders provides recipes on eating insects. The school also offers an LGBT club for elementary school students.

The Obvious Purpose

The school system’s agenda is pretty obvious.

Is it any wonder that religious parents would be concerned about their children — again, kindergarten to fifth grade — being exposed to extreme LGBT ideology? Critics pretend kids are just being told stories that include LGBT characters and that only bigots would oppose kids learning about different types of people. The first judge dismissed the parents saying they “failed to show that the lack of an opt-out policy would result in the ‘indoctrination of their children’ or ‘coerce their children to violate or change their religious beliefs.’”

However, these are books designed to teach kids about being LGBT themselves, not simply about LGBT experiences, history, or health education. This is an environment where kids are heavily encouraged to explore sexuality and gender ideology, with expansive resources, instruction guides, and clubs. Of course, religious parents would consider this to be an invasive level of activism and indoctrination.

It should be obvious to anyone that forcing parents to accept this instruction for their children violates their religious freedom, and the obnoxious dismissal from a judge that parents can simply undo whatever their kids learn in school further mocks these sacred rights. Left-wing, LGBT activists simply want full control over children’s education and have constructed a system that not only excludes parents but intentionally isolates their children from them in school.

LGBT activists believe they know best for all students, and that all students need to learn about LGBT ideology in an open, proactive, and affirming way, and if parents oppose this instruction, they don’t need to know about it, or worse, have no power to stop it. Unfortunately, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just strengthened this abuse of power by school systems, degrading parental rights and religious freedom even further.

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.

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38 Chaplains Ask Supreme Court to Stop U.S. Military from Punishing Their Faith


BY: JOY PULLMANN | APRIL 01, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/01/38-chaplains-ask-supreme-court-to-stop-u-s-military-from-punishing-their-faith/

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A healthy little Dutch girl without a proper name died 52 years ago. Scientists keep her kidney’s cells multiplying in a process similar to cancer. They perform increasing numbers of experiments on derivatives of this baby girl’s kidney cells to develop technologies that include taste-testing experiments for PepsiCo. Her vivisection forms “the backbone of the global gene therapy market.”

Scientists call the baby girl HEK 293. HEK stands for “human embryonic kidney,” and 293 means she was the 293rd experiment in a set.

She likely died from an elective abortion, not a miscarriage, concludes a 2006 journal article and many other scientific publications. An older gestational age and harvesting her kidney while still alive would have made her more useful for experimentation, as Planned Parenthood officials affirmed of their baby harvesting operations in 2015.

Like many medications, Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics were tested on cells made from HEK 293’s kidney. Some of the vaccines have HEK 293 cells inside them. That’s one of several reasons Capt. Rob Nelson, an Air Force chaplain, couldn’t in good conscience accept those treatments despite massive pressure from the military, he told The Federalist in a phone interview.

“I have five [children], and it breaks my heart to think of this. This girl continues to be violated as her cells are replicated over and over again,” he said.

Nelson is one of 38 military chaplains whose petition is now before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the case Alvarado v. Austin. The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate, which the petition says has allowed statistically zero exceptions.

Eliminating People with Strong Ethical Boundaries from the Military

The DOD continues to violate the law by failing to rescind its punishments of conscientious objectors such as denied training and deployments required for promotions, the petition says. In addition, of course, denying soldiers’ religious exercise violates the First Amendment’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith in their everyday lives.

That is precisely why the military has chaplains, several told The Federalist. All soldiers, their families, and civilians working for the U.S. military “have a right to believe what they believe and no one can say otherwise. It’s the same reason we can’t have a religious test for federal positions. As a chaplain, my job is to make sure the free exercise of religion is allowed, that nobody infringes upon that inalienable right,” said Army Col. Brad Lewis, a chaplain also party to the suit.

Chaplains usually help determine whether soldiers receive religious accommodations for all sorts of things, from Norse pagans wearing beards to Sikhs wearing turbans and Jews eating kosher. While the military routinely approves such waivers, it told Congress it had denied essentially all religious vaccine waiver requests from soldiers who weren’t almost retired, say the plaintiffs.

“I got in with an age waiver,” Nelson noted of his military service. “They can supposedly give wavers for all kinds of things but not a religious accommodation.”

In its Supreme Court response filed March 27, the DOD claims it has removed all punishments from soldiers imposed “solely” for conscientious objections to vaccines. It claims removing career penalties that arise from banning conscientious objectors from career-promoting training and duties has no “lawful basis.” The DOD also says that because the vaccination requirement has ended, the case is moot.

“By denying religious exemptions, what the military has done is set about the removal of people who are willing to stand on conviction,” Lewis said. He and Nelson noted this dynamic is especially dangerous if cultivated among soldiers, whose job is to kill.

Four Years Deployed to Defend Freedoms the Military Denies Him

Lewis has dedicated more than 30 years of his life to the U.S. military, including 47 months of deployment. He’s taken seven deployments to Afghanistan, six to Iraq, and an entire year away from his wife and four children in South Korea. He’s a fourth-generation Assemblies of God pastor whose father also served in the U.S. military during the Cold War.

Lewis was the senior chaplain on Hawaii’s island of Oahu when the Army recommended him as one of two chaplains in 2020 to receive instruction at the U.S. Army War College.

Image of Col. Brad Lewis by U.S. Army / public domain

War College training is the height of an Army career. It’s preparation for high-level officer assignments. While he studied there, Lewis was ordered to take a Covid vaccine. But his conscience wouldn’t let him.

The immense global pressure for an untested medical treatment alarmed Lewis’ long-developed spiritual spidey senses: “The fact that commerce and travel and careers were hinging on receipt of this vaccine, that bothered me.” It seemed to violate biblical injunctions against total obedience to any state.

Lewis and his wife spent months talking about what to do. They knew objecting could kill his career right as he hit its peak, after decades of personal and family sacrifices.

In the end, he couldn’t violate his duty to obey the still, small voice inside, Lewis says. So he filed for a religious exemption. Like almost every other solely religious exemption of the 37,000 DOD told Congress soldiers filed, it was delayed. Then it was denied. So were Lewis’ appeals. He says his superiors told him he could get vaccinated or get drummed out of the military, but while Lewis was willing to sacrifice his body for his country, he would not sacrifice his soul.

So the Army punished him, first by leaving him with no orders upon graduation from War College. That left Lewis and his wife to sit for 11 months in student housing with no assignment for Lewis while another class of students came and went.

“My career was ended by those 11 months of unrated time,” Lewis said. The inaction the Army forced him into destroyed his ratings in the military’s evaluating system. When Congress ended the vaccine mandate, the military assigned Lewis to a rural post in Maryland, where he mostly oversees civilian contractors across the world who have local pastors to tend their spiritual needs.

He says he’s asked superiors whether he will have any opportunities to use his high-level, taxpayer-provided War College training. Lewis says they repeatedly ignored the question. So he’s filed to retire and will leave the Army for good in early 2025.

“I took real strength in the idea that my faith is more important than some bureaucrat’s opinion of my faith. It sustained me, it got me through,” Lewis said.

After asking The Federalist to provide Lewis’ birth date and Social Security Number and to delay this article’s publication, U.S. Army spokeswoman Heather Hagan, who according to her email signature works in the Pentagon, finally provided this in response to a request for comment: “As a matter of policy, the Army does not comment on ongoing litigation.”

Not Just about Harvesting Killed Babies

Each conscientious objector’s reasoning is in some way unlike all the others’. There are commonalities, but they blend in individual ways, like fingerprints. That’s why religious objections to vaccines are not erased by a European Covid shot called Novavax, which its owner claims was developed and produced with no human embryo brutalization.

Army Chief of Chaplains Thomas Solhjem, who is now retired, highlighted Novavax when it came out in 2022. He ignored many soldiers’ religious objections not based on the vaccines’ use of murdered babies. They include concerns about damaging human health and reproductive capacity, ignoring natural immunity, the ethics of allegedly emergency decrees, the lack of informed consent, and heavy-handed manipulation tactics that include refusing to acknowledge any potentially legitimate conscience objections to the shots whatsoever.

It’s also unlikely any medical intervention today lacks a connection with the discarded little girl. Research done on cells descended from HEK 293’s tiny body is so “ubiquitous” now, wrote Dr. Melissa Moschella in 2020, that “Anyone who wants to completely avoid benefiting from the use of HEK 293 would effectively have to eschew the use of any medical treatments or biological knowledge developed or updated within the past forty years.” Even Tylenol was developed using cells her body generated.

Lewis said Solhjem’s video “blew my mind” because the job of a chaplain is not to negotiate people’s religious beliefs, it’s to support their exercise: “He didn’t say, ‘I stand with you. No matter what your reasons are, you have a right to believe them, and I will stand and die here defending your right.’ … It’s antithetical to what chaplains are supposed to do.”

‘The Department of Defense Is Hostile to Religion’

Several chaplains provided The Federalist “scripts” that military branches sent chaplains to pressure conscientious objectors into compliance rather than ascertain whether their objections were sincere. They include quotes from figures such as imams and preacher Russell Moore supporting vaccination.

But, for example, the Bible doesn’t say Russell Moore is its chief prophet and interpreter. While theologians and church tradition are helpful guides that Christians should take seriously, the final authority over Christianity is the Bible itself, and it says every individual is responsible before God for how he understands and applies it.

“The Department of Defense is hostile to religion,” said the chaplains’ lawyer, Art Schulcz, who is also a veteran. He said the way the DOD handled the vaccine mandate has contributed to the military’s recruiting crisis by repelling recruits and current soldiers with serious faith convictions. In response to ongoing shortfalls, U.S. military branches are lowering enlistment standards and issuing waivers of risk factors such as marijuana use.

The U.S. military’s chaplains “recruiting deficit is extreme,” wrote Rear Adm. Gregory Todd, the Navy’s chief of chaplains, last year.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Note to Ketanji Brown Jackson: The First Amendment Should ‘Hamstring’ the Government. That’s the Entire Point.


By: Tyler O’Neil / @Tyler2ONeil / March 19, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/19/note-ketanji-brown-jackson-first-amendment-should-hamstring-government-thats-entire-point/

Ketanji Brown Jackson shakes hands with a man in a blue suit while she wears a large necklace above her black robes
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested in oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis. Pictured: Jackson arrives for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at the Capitol on March 7. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government strong-armed Big Tech companies into censoring as “disinformation” Americans’ true experiences while effectively mandating government propaganda, which itself turned out to be misinformation. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether that strategy violated the First Amendment.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested during oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis.

Jackson asked J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the solicitor general of Louisiana, a rather revealing question about the issue.

“So, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson said.

The Supreme Court justice presented an extremely unlikely hypothetical that most American young people would find very insulting. She presented a scenario in which young people took cellphone video of their peers jumping out of windows, and that trend went viral on social media (preposterous), Big Tech companies failed to take action on their own (very unlikely), and the government wanted to stop it.

She asked Aguiñaga, “What would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.”

“So, I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” Jackson said. “I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”

“I understand that instinct,” Aguiñaga replied. “Our position is not that the government can’t interact with the platforms there … but the way they do that has to be in compliance with the First Amendment.”

Jackson suggested it would be unjust for the First Amendment to limit the government’s actions in addressing a hypothetical crisis, but the First Amendment expressly exists in order to hamstring the federal government.

As Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in response to Jackson’s concern about the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government, “that’s what it’s supposed to do, for goodness’ sake.”

The amendment states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The amendment does not include a “crisis-exemption clause” allowing the government to trample on free speech if the president declares a national emergency. If it did, President Joe Biden might declare a national emergency on climate and strong-arm Big Tech into censoring opposition to the climate alarmist narrative. He might declare a national emergency on the nonexistent “epidemic” of violence against transgender people, and pressure social media to ban any disagreement with gender ideology.

Big Tech platforms already censor conservative speech on those issues, but it could become far worse.

Missouri v. Murthy presents an excellent illustration.

The plaintiffs in the case—Missouri and Louisiana, represented by state Attorneys General Andrew Bailey and Liz Murrill, respectively; doctors who spoke out against the COVID-19 mandates, such as Martin Kulldorff, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty; Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft; and anti-lockdown advocate and Health Freedom Louisiana Co-Director Jill Hines—allege that the Biden administration “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election; on COVID-19 issues, including its origin, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines; on election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; on the security of voting by mail; on the economy; and on Joe Biden himself.

On July 4, federal Judge Terry Doughty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction barring the Biden administration from pressuring Big Tech to censor Americans. Doughty’s injunction named various federal agencies—including the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly directed), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department—and officials, including HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the extent of Doughty’s injunction, and the Supreme Court stayed the 5th Circuit’s order before taking up the case.

“The Twitter Files” revealed how the process worked: Federal agencies would have frequent meetings with Big Tech companies, warning about “misinformation” and repeatedly pressuring them to remove or suppress content. Federal agents and politicians occasionally threatened that if the companies did not act, the government would reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, removing legal protections the companies enjoyed.

As Justice Samuel Alito noted, federal officials treated Facebook, Twitter (now X), and other social media companies “like their subordinates.”

As part of this lawsuit, Bailey unearthed documents in which Facebook told the White House that it suppressed “often-true content” that might discourage Americans from taking COVID-19 vaccines. In that context, Jackson’s question about the First Amendment “hamstringing the government” seems particularly alarming. The federal government did not act to suppress speech amid an existential crisis like a world war or a civil war. It acted after good data became available showing that COVID-19 poses a deadly threat to the elderly and those with co-morbidities, and while the government was advocating vaccines for all populations, not just the most vulnerable.

Jackson’s question suggests that she wants the government to have more control over speech on social media, even after the abuses this case uncovered. If the First Amendment is good for anything, it should “hamstring” the government from silencing Americans in order to push its own propaganda. Jackson, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, should know that.

Then again, if she can’t define the word “woman,” perhaps Americans shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t grasp the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.

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Why CISA’s Censorship and Election Interference Work Is The ‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’


BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 05, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/05/why-cisas-censorship-and-election-interference-work-is-the-most-insidious-attack-on-american-democracy/

Cyber security illustration of lock on grid as shadowy characters pass.

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West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.

The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”

“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states. 

The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” 

‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’

Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime. 

CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient. 

A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.

Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”

But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.”  CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit. 

“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,”  The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May. 

‘Only a Matter of Time’ 

Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role. 

As the congressional report notes: 

  • CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
  • CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States. 
  • CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
  • CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”  

The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”

‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’

Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.

But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.” 

But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats. 

CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.” 

Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong. 

A Warning

It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign. 

“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”

Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.  

“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote. 

“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added. 

They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.” 

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.

Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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Biden Regime Ratchets Up Its Authoritarianism With Arrest Of Blaze Investigative Reporter


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 01, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/01/biden-regime-ratchets-up-its-authoritarianism-with-arrest-of-blaze-investigative-reporter/

Steve Baker during an interview.

Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.

“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”

As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.

While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.

While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.

Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.

The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.

Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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If Memes Are Illegal, All Speech Will Become Illegal


BY: LOMEZ | FEBRUARY 29, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/29/if-memes-are-illegal-all-speech-will-become-illegal/

meme about texting a Hillary Clinton vote

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Thirty years ago, the incendiary columnist Sam Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” to describe a state of affairs in which the government cannot or will not enforce laws against serious criminals and instead exerts excessive and often arbitrary force on ordinary citizens.

Francis’s coinage, conceived against the backdrop of the crack epidemic and attendant crime wave of the late ’80s and early ’90s, was provoked by a series of feckless gun laws ostensibly designed to curb armed crime. But in practice, they were used to harass ordinary gun owners. The original column appeared in December 1992, a few months after an off-the-grid Vietnam vet was entrapped by an undercover ATF agent for the illegal sale of a shotgun, leading to a raid on his cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the murder of his dog, son, and wife by federal agents.

Anarcho-tyranny is not an intentional conspiracy to subvert the rule of law. There are no smoke-filled rooms where the anarcho-tyranny white paper is passed around among policymakers. It is simply the natural devolution of a government undergoing a crisis of authority: As power slackens in one direction, it must tighten in another.

After a two-decade respite, the days of anarcho-tyranny have returned, perhaps more explicitly than ever. Since at least 2016, leftist DAs around the country have made it their explicit aim to decriminalize every offense short of murder (and sometimes that, too) and empty the prisons of even the most dangerous felons. Violent crime is once again a mainstay of big-city life. Drug addicts and psychopaths haunt the subways. Flagrant theft is forcing businesses to shutter and lock away their goods behind walls of plexiglass. In San Francisco alone, roughly 2,000 car break-ins are committed per month — with a less than 1 percent arrest rate. The George Floyd riots of 2020 amassed upward of $2 billion in damage, while its perpetrators were rewarded with tens of millions in exculpatory payouts.

The state, which is currently controlled by a party whose political clients are the agents of this disorder, has responded by cracking down on anyone who tries to intervene (murder charges brought against Kyle Rittenhouse, Jacob Gardner, and Daniel Penny demonstrate the point) and has mercilessly prosecuted red Americans who have responded in kind (compare the millions in payouts for Black Lives Matter rioters to the excessive sentencing of Jan. 6 defendants for example). Even more insidiously, the state, in the absence of neutral enforcement of the laws as they exist, is employing an expansive reading of civil rights law to punish their political enemies and flex their tyrannical authority.

Currently, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating conservative activist Christ Rufo for refusing to play the pronoun game with his colleagues at the New College in Florida. Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter and subsequent release of a trove of internal documents exposed the hand-in-glove relationship between the federal government and (former) Twitter executives to suppress conservative speech, now faces a civil rights lawsuit for the crime of not hiring refugees to work at SpaceX.

These targeted prosecutions are scandals in their own right, but they pale in comparison to the treatment of Douglass Mackey, whose recent conviction is the canary in the coal mine for what’s coming down the pike.

Douglass Mackey’s Memes

Mackey, the man behind the now-defunct Twitter persona Ricky Vaughn, was convicted on March 31 of this year of “conspiracy against rights” in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241, a Reconstruction Era law designed to counteract the violent voter suppression tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. In October, Mackey was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.

Mackey’s alleged conspiracy? Posting a joke meme on Twitter.

Really. See for yourself.

The offending tweet features an image of a mock political flier, which, according to federal prosecutors, was aimed at deceiving Hillary Clinton voters with the text, “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” Another tweet, also named in the suit, instructs readers to cast their vote by posting the word “Hillary” to Facebook and Twitter alongside the hashtag #PresidentialElection.

It’s a mildly provocative troll, a wry jab at the absurdity of get-out-the-vote efforts, which target the most civically illiterate members of the public. But never mind whether the joke is good or bad, it is obviously a joke, obvious enough that posters far less clever than Mackey have made it before. Kristina Wong, a semi-prominent Twitter Democrat, posted a nearly identical tweet during the same election cycle encouraging her fellow “Chinese Americans for Trump and people of color for Trump” to vote on “Super Wednesday,” adding, “TEXT in your vote! Text votes are legit.”

Fair play, in other words. Jokes, trolls, accusations, deceptions, outright lies of the most salacious, malicious, and truly deplorable nature are all part of the daily maelstrom of political informational warfare. You may find this kind of partisan mud-slinging degrading, even regrettable, but the grand spectacle of American democracy has always been this way. We take the good with the bad, the funny with the cringe. If you want something different, a system of laws and norms that promises a little more dignity, well… that’s another conversation for another time. For now, this is the game we’re all playing, and the rules, enshrined by the First Amendment, are the rules.

Or so we thought. If you are a Trump supporter like Mackey, rather than an obedient party apparatchik like Wong, the rules no longer apply. When, as Mackey’s case demonstrates, the state can expand the purview of a law meant to thwart acts of Klan violence to include online “disinformation,” it can render almost any action illegal. Every utterance, to the extent it has a political valence, is a potential crime. Everything is against the law, but the law only applies to the state’s political enemies.

If this is an exaggeration, it is so only barely.

Here are some more facts that provide a fuller picture of the circumstances of Mackey’s alleged crime and their implications. Mackey’s meme first appeared on Twitter on Nov. 1, 2016. It wasn’t until January 2021, two days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that charges were filed. Despite Mackey living in Florida, the DOJ used a dubious legal reading to have the case tried in the hostile Eastern District of New York, under the auspices of newly appointed U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, in front of a Democrat activist judge who in 2017 issued an emergency stay to block Trump’s executive order on refugee resettlements, and in front of a Brooklyn jury pool that voted 4 to 1 in favor of Joe Biden.

The most astonishing fact is that the case was brought in the absence of any victim. According to the Justice Department, 4,900 people texted the fake number in the tweet. Out of these, the Justice Department found not a single person who claimed to have been deceived by the meme or who thought that texting “Hillary” to 59925 constituted a valid vote.

Mackey’s real crime, his real sin, was being an effective right-wing provocateur. According to an analysis from MIT Media Labs, Mackey’s Twitter account, @TheRickyVaughn, with a little over 50,000 followers at the time of the election, was one of the most influential social media accounts in the country, ranking higher than NBC News and prominent Democrat mouthpieces like Stephen Colbert.

Mackey’s prolific output and acerbic wit, his unique ability to proselytize the ideological foundations of Trumpism with native digital fluency, is what made him a target. It is also true that Mackey could be blatantly offensive, but the need to protect offensive speech only underscores the principles of free expression at stake. Ultimately, he represented the breakup of the informational monopoly held by the state’s preferred opinion makers, and that is why he was prosecuted. The candidacy of Donald Trump, a sui generis figure in a hundred different ways, and whose own subsequent legal entanglements operate from the same logic of excessive prosecutorial zeal, was animated, at least in part, by the unconstrained energy of online troublemakers like Mackey.

And like Trump, Mackey had to be held to account for exposing these vulnerabilities in the system. Again, where power slackens in one direction (losing control of the electorate), it must tighten in another (stringing up meme makers). The likeness here isn’t merely symbolic. Remember 18 U.S.C. § 241? This same law, which according to legal scholar Eugene Volokh has never been used to prosecute a speech act, is precisely the law federal prosecutor Jack Smith is relying on to indict Trump. Douglass Mackey’s case isn’t a standalone act of prosecutorial aggression; it is the foundation for a new legal regime that intends to cast a net over the entire ocean of online speech.

Broadening the Law’s Scope

The precedent set in the Mackey case eschews any limiting principle on how the law can be applied. Any “disinformation” — that is, any untrue statement, even crude jokes, like jesting that Michelle Obama is a man, or that [insert politician] is really an alien lizard in a human skinsuit — so long as it might deter someone from voting, is a potential crime. Even the mild suggestion that voting is irrational, a belief long held by many mainstream political scientists, could count as a criminal act under this reading of Section 241. This broadening of scope is precisely the point.

In his 1964 book The Morality of Law, legal theorist Lon L. Fuller tells the parable of King Rex, an ambitious though naive ruler who attempts to reform his kingdom’s legal system from the ground up. First, his legal code is too narrow, then too broad, too abstruse, then too plain. His subjects’ dissatisfaction mounts, until the king realizes that by making his laws impossible to obey, he can bring his enemies to heel whenever he chooses.

“It was made a crime, punishable by 10 years’ imprisonment, to cough, sneeze, hiccough, faint or fall down in the presence of the king,” Fuller writes. In other words, there was no law, only the king’s discretion concerning who deserved punishment or mercy.

The 17th-century polemicist Leveler “Free Born” John Lilburne called such a state of affairs a “lawless unlimited power.” It eventually led to a revolution. We’re not there yet, but when one of our fellow citizens faces federal prison time for a joke, we are forgiven for being reminded of dear King Rex.

In the coming year, we will be treated to a warmed-over buffet of sermons by our intellectual betters on the sanctity of Our Democracy™. We will be relentlessly hounded to check under our beds and in our closets for purveyors of “disinformation.” While the streets are overrun with another round of election year “mostly peaceful protests,” the border is swamped by a deluge of illegal immigrants, and our major metros are ravaged by wanton criminality, we will do well to consider what we stand for, and where we will draw the line­.

L0m3z is the founder and editor of Passage Press.

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Biden Cried ‘Book Ban,’ Then Pressured Amazon to Ban His Opponents from World’s Biggest Bookstore


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | FEBRUARY 09, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/09/biden-cried-book-ban-then-pressured-amazon-to-ban-his-opponents-from-worlds-biggest-bookstore/

Joe Biden talks to woman in a library

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Democrats and their accomplices in the media have expended an awful lot of ink, breath, and energy trying to convince voters that people on the right want to “ban books.” The leftist firestorm attacks concerned parents working to eradicate pornography and other age-inappropriate books from taxpayer-funded schools and libraries. These works include titles such as All Boys Aren’t Blue, which contains descriptions of rape, incest, and pedophilia, and Gender Queer, which shows graphic depictions of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual acts.

Democrat activists have come out in full-throated defense of explicit sexual content for children and likened conservatives who oppose it to Nazis who want to burn books. Last month, MSNBC host Joy Reid grilled the co-founder of Moms for Liberty about why parents should have any say in how their tax dollars are used and argued that kids who identify as LGBT “feel seen” by stories about child rape.

One Democrat governor ironically argued that Republican efforts to shield children from age-inappropriate content are “castrating them.” President Joe Biden has also smeared Republicans for “banning books,” and even announced during “pride month” that he would appoint a “book ban coordinator” to make sure schools weren’t removing filth from their shelves.

That’s why it was so ridiculous to learn this week that all while Democrats were shrieking about pornography “book bans,” the Biden White House was actively “pressuring” Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, to nuke books that raised concerns about experimental Covid-19 shots. It’s a pretty good bet that’s not the only topic the White House pressured Amazon to ban, either. According to internal documents and emails subpoenaed by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, senior Biden official Andy Slavitt, who pressured Facebook to censor speech, was pushing Amazon to ban books disagreeing with Democrat policies.

Because Slavitt didn’t like the “concerning” results that turned up when he searched Amazon books for “vaccines,” he emailed the corporation on March 2, 2021, to ask to whom Biden officials could speak about “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon.” The vaccine debate was, and is still, ongoing. But the White House was mad that Amazon didn’t slap a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention onto books that stepped out of line from the government’s Covid claims.

At first, Amazon opted not to manually censor books. But as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wrote on X, it wasn’t “out of any commitment to free speech, but because doing so would be ‘too visible’ to the American public and likely to spur criticism from conservative media.” Amazon noted it was already taking heat for censoring Ryan T. Anderson’s book on the transgender debate, When Harry Became Sally, the month prior. The White House fired back, irritated that Amazon didn’t editorialize its book product pages with context tags, the way X and Facebook propagandist “fact-checkers” do. As Jordan pointed out, the administration couldn’t have Americans thinking for themselves.

Biden’s team was so demanding that by the time Amazon met with White House officials the next week, the company’s No. 1 question was, “Is the Admin asking us to remove books?” And the demands apparently worked. March 9, the same day as Amazon’s meeting with administration officials, it opted not to “promote” books the Democrat administration didn’t like. Just a few days later, it said it was looking into other steps “to reduce the visibility” of books that ticked off the Biden regime.

So just to be clear, at the same time the propaganda press and Democrats were crying “book ban” because rightly concerned parents were trying to eradicate taxpayer-funded gay porn from school libraries, the Biden administration was colluding with the world’s biggest bookstore to bury non-leftist viewpoints from sight.

Since we’re talking about Amazon, here’s another thing. Democrats, who claim to be mad that you don’t want your kid waltzing into the library and willy-nilly snagging a picture book about one little boy giving another little boy a blow job, can effortlessly nab a copy of any of these books with the click of a button and have them Amazon “Primed” to their doorsteps overnight. These graphic books aren’t “banned” in any sense of the word.

Meanwhile, Democrats are willing to exert undo pressure from the highest office in the land to ensure mainstream viewpoints it doesn’t like are as difficult as possible to find — or nuked from Amazon’s mega bookstore altogether. Maybe there is such a thing as a “book ban.” But it’s not on gay porn for kiddos.

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.

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Why Big Tech Needs First Amendment to Censor You


By: Joel Thayer / February 05, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/05/why-big-tech-needs-first-amendment-to-censor-you/

The social media platforms say, on the one hand, they have every right to act as publishers to curate their platforms any way they see fit. On the other hand, they say they are not publishers to gain legal immunity under Section 230. They can’t be allowed to have it both ways. (Photo: Jonathan Raa/Nur Photo/Getty Images)

Big Tech is back at the Supreme Court.

Appealing from a big loss they suffered at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, social media platforms are challenging Texas’ social media law that prohibits those companies from engaging in viewpoint discrimination when curating their platforms.

They claim Texas’ law violates their First Amendment rights for compelling them to host content. In other words, the platforms are saying that prohibiting a platform’s viewpoint censorship is effectively the same as forcing students in public schools to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

HUH??? What, WHAT?

It’s an odd argument for myriad reasons, but mainly because Big Tech has continually said that they serve as neutral platforms that merely transmit information from one point to another, like an internet service provider or a telephone.

They don’t claim to be publishers, like a newspaper or broadcaster. For example, Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times that Facebook “explicitly view[s] [itself] as not editors … .”  Nor “does [Facebook] want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed.”

Zuckerberg’s view is consistent with Big Tech’s court representations when seeking legal immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Act. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; X, the former Twitter; and Google have all stated that they are neither responsible for, nor materially contribute to, their users’ content to avoid liability for hosting it.

In other words, they are conduits of others’ speech, not speakers themselves.

It’s why their First Amendment argument is patently confusing: You have to be speaking to avail yourself of its protection.

It’s also why the First Amendment has long allowed the government to apply nondiscrimination laws, as Texas did, on communications platforms that merely transmit the speech of others. For instance, telephone companies are prohibited from discriminating against callers. 

The courts have upheld nondiscrimination provisions imposed on internet service providers.  And the Supreme Court has held that even a property owner must allow expressive activities on his property.

However, platforms say, on the one hand, they have every right to act as publishers to curate their platforms any way they see fit. On the other hand, they say they are not publishers to gain legal immunity under Section 230.

Not only are these two positions contradictory, but they are also inconsistent with the First Amendment’s history and its jurisprudence. The relevant part of the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech … .” James Madison, when drafting the Free Speech Clause, intended it as a bulwark against government influence over what we can say or do. It doesn’t provide for tech exceptionalism.

Indeed, the opposite is true. Yes, the First Amendment does derive, in part, from Madison’s—and the nation’s—distrust over the concentrated power the government wields. But Madison also knew that private operators, too, could be a source of concentrated authority, and, if left unchecked, could amass more power than the government itself.

Today’s tech behemoths have proven Madison’s skepticism warranted. The power of social media platforms have over speech eclipses that of any sitting president or government. As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas succinctly put it, social media companies can “remove [an] account ‘at any time for any or no reason.’” In this case, Twitter, now X, “unapologetically argues that it could turn around and ban all pro-LGBT speech for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community … .”

And recent history shows that the tech titans aren’t shy at doing just that with impunity.

YouTube blocks and demonetizes users who support certain political candidates or content creators that Google does not favor. What was then still Twitter censored The New York Post for accurate reporting ahead of a consequential election. Facebook even removed posts that shared a study published by the British Medical Journal—one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in the world—because the platform believed the study was disinformation for calling some of Pfizer’s data on its COVID-19 vaccines’ effectiveness into question.

It’s clear from their advocacy in this case that Big Tech companies don’t truly care about free speech. What they really care about is liability. If Texas is now going to hold them accountable for these decisions to censor users, then they are going to need another liability shield for that.

Big Tech thinks the First Amendment is the vessel to ensure they have complete immunity from any scrutiny. Candidly, it’s hard to imagine that Madison drafted the First Amendment as a corporate instrument to cut down an individual’s speech, but that’s what they argue. Not to mince words, their aim in this case is to contort the application of the First Amendment to create more protections to void every legislative proposal directed at them. It has almost nothing to do with free speech.

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You’d Be Surprised Which States Persecute Religious Schools and Charities


BY: TIM ROSENBERGER | DECEMBER 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/26/youd-be-surprised-which-states-persecute-religious-schools-and-charities/

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Attempts to sideline religion from American public life are not new, but whereas conservatives typically think that this type of discrimination is endemic to blue states, the reality is much more complex. In fact, in a new Manhattan Institute report, Notre Dame Law Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett and I discover that states throughout the country are breaking the law by persecuting religious schools and charities.

The Supreme Court, in last year’s Carson v. Makin, clarified that states cannot exclude religious organizations because they are religious or force such organizations to secularize their offerings. Despite the clarity of the court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, many states, including some that one would expect to embrace religious freedom, continue to discriminate against religious organizations unfairly.

Here are nine of the most unexpected offenders.

1. Virginia

Disabled students suffer because of Virginia’s violation of the First Amendment. Virginia’s school districts and local governments can contract with any “public or private nonsectarian school, agency, institution,” or “nonsectarian child-day programs” to provide special education services. If the nearest option or best fit for your student happens to have a religious affiliation, your child will have to attend a further or worse option to receive funding.

Historically black colleges and universities and other nonprofit institutions of higher education are unconstitutionally prevented from using state funds for facilities or programs related to “sectarian instruction.” Virginia singles out religious institutions for worse treatment under industrial development powers and in eligibility for historic preservation consideration and grants, and excludes them from receiving funds to provide social services. Egregiously, this latter provision specifically singles out some religious organizations — the YMCA, YWCA, Habitat for Humanity, and the Salvation Army — for special treatment.

Virginia provides a tax rebate for fuel used in school buses but excludes buses used to take students to religious schools. 

2. Montana

Montana similarly provides funding for day education of students in private institutions so long as they are at “private, non-sectarian schools.” Like Virginia, Montana excludes religious schools from its school bus fuel tax rebate.

Montana’s work-study program allows students to work in construction and building maintenance but excludes from eligibility any building “used or to be used for sectarian instruction or as a place of worship.”

Religious health care providers face restrictions on how they can use funds under a Montana low-cost capital scheme for new buildings. And while Montana offers a permissive array of nonprofit-themed specialty license plates, including plates celebrating a soccer club, a shooting club, and a group that feeds animals, religious nonprofits are explicitly excluded from the plate program.

3. Georgia

Georgia does not allow pre-kindergarten providers to give any religious instruction. It specifies that this rule extends even to programs that have both approved secular and religious versions and notes that no funds may be spent on religious instruction.

Religious organizations are excluded from the state’s rural loan guarantee program. Suppose a church in Georgia wants to use taxpayer funds to feed the hungry, house the homeless, or provide health care. In that case, it must fastidiously maintain a separate budget for its welfare ministries. This paperwork nightmare means many churches offer fewer services than they otherwise might.

Georgia even imposes restrictions on the generosity of its employees, empowering them to contribute to nonprofits but excluding any “religious organization.”

4. Alabama

Though in better shape than Georgia, Alabama still falls well short of Carson’s requirements. The state allows a moment of silence during the pre-K school day but forbids religious instruction. Any religious activities must take place “outside of … the school day.”

In much the same way, Alabama theoretically allows students to use its higher education grants at religious colleges but requires that schools accepting the grants use them only for “essentially secular education functions” and “carefully segregate funds to ensure that this rule is enforced.” The law would presumably exclude from funding those students who are pursuing careers as clergy, religious school teachers, and faith-based counselors.

Alabama places restrictions on funding structures used for religious purposes, restricts the content of services at family resource centers and municipal special health care facilities, and excludes faith-based organizations from the state’s employees’ combined charitable campaign.

Perhaps most amusingly, Alabama does not allow religious nonprofits to enjoy proceeds from greyhound racing days.

5. Arkansas

Arkansas similarly restricts pre-K content to be “secular and neutral with respect to religion.” It also requires that distance-learning providers be nonsectarian.

Arkansas subjects its citizens to a lifetime of unconstitutional forced secularism. A family of a child under 2 will find that Arkansas’ Life Choices Lifeline Program permits only nonsectarian content. Arkansawyers in programs receiving youth development grants cannot participate in religious instruction, services, or programming. Elders in the Arkansas Older Workers Community Service Employment Program cannot build or maintain any facilities used for religious instruction or worship.  

Despite the state’s proud history as the buckle of America’s Bible Belt, its Small Museum Grant Program excludes any religious projects. Local waterworks commissions can make donations to community chests but not to any sectarian nonprofits.

6. Oregon

While other states place unconstitutional restrictions on the activities of faith-based pre-K providers, Oregon goes an egregious step further, outright banning religious organizations from its universal pre-K program.

Oregon violates Carson in later education too. High school students can enroll in college classes through the state’s Expanded Options Program but may only select courses that are “nonsectarian.” Similarly, while the state can contract with private institutions, courses must be “nonsectarian educational services” or “nonsectarian subjects completed by undergraduate students.”

7. Florida

Florida has provided grants to faith-based, in-person education providers through its Family Empowerment Scholarship program. But its laws, while conforming to abandoned Supreme Court precedent, must comply with the demands of the First Amendment as clarified in Carson.

At present, Florida does not allow sectarian organizations to participate in its remote learning program. It operates two separate scholarship programs that exclude religious schools and refuse funding to students pursuing degrees in “theology or divinity.”

Perhaps most concerningly, Florida places restrictions on the content of programming provided to victims of domestic violence. Its Batterer Intervention program excludes any study of “faith-based ideology,” even when such content would be helpful to victims.

8. Missouri

Missouri has been at the center of recent caselaw clarifying the First Amendment since the Supreme Court found that Missouri violated the free exercise clause by excluding a faith-based preschool from a state program that provided recycled tires for playground surfacing. While Missouri has improved its laws, work remains to be done.

Juniors and seniors in private Missouri colleges can get state loans for tuition. But those loans cannot be used for any “sectarian” instruction. Missouri’s Health and Educational Facilities Authority Act provides loans for educational facilities except for “property used or to be used for sectarian instruction or study.”

More concerningly, Missouri does not allow support services for high-risk students to be offered at private, religious schools. This means a struggling student at a St. Louis Catholic high school or Lutheran middle school would have to leave campus to receive the services they need to be successful. This burden can make much-needed services inaccessible for the students most in need of the rigor and structure afforded by parochial schools.

9. Indiana

Under Indiana’s work-study program, students cannot be paid for “sectarian” work. The state’s Division of Family Resources must exclude any sectarian work from its contracts with nonprofits. If a county wants to support its local nonprofit hospital, it can only do so if the hospital’s board is “nonsectarian.” This provision excludes struggling faith-based community hospitals from support despite their essential services and, in many cases, decades as community anchors.

An Indiana historic preservation grant applicant must have “no affiliation with religion.” Most disturbingly, Indiana regulates the religious expression of the dead, with a law stating that a memorial corporation cannot “promote the interests or teachings of a specific church, sect, school, or creed.”

The Path Forward

American conservatives often think of themselves as the defenders of the First Amendment and religious liberty in particular. Many are probably shocked to see their states among the worst violators of the Carson principle.

Fortunately, red states should be able to act quickly to remedy these violations by amending laws or having their state attorneys general issue opinion letters committing to the state’s conformity to the First Amendment.

For states that refuse to meet their constitutional obligations, lawyers from the Becket Fund, law school religious liberty clinics, and think tanks stand ready to vindicate infringed religious liberties.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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ACLU Teams With Conservative Religious Liberty Group to Sue DC Metro Over Ad Restrictions That Violate First Amendment


By: Katelynn Richardson / @katesrichardson / December 12, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/12/aclu-teams-with-conservative-religious-liberty-group-to-sue-dc-metro-over-ad-restrictions-that-violate-first-amendment/

The ACLU and First Liberty Institute are challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising. Pictured: A train pulls into Metro Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2016. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)

The American Civil Liberties Union joined with the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute on Monday to challenge the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising as First Amendment violations. The two groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of WallBuilder Presentations, an organization that raises awareness about the “moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” after WMATA said the ads it wanted to display on buses violated its advertising guidelines.

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WMATA restricts ads “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying public opinions,” along with those that “promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief.”

“Though WMATA never identified the specific issue of public controversy that it believed the proposed advertisements addressed, it is apparent that WallBuilders was prohibited from advertising because its proposed ads sought to address issues of public importance from a religious viewpoint,” the complaint alleges.

The ads display depictions of Founding Fathers overlayed with the word “Christian?” and invite viewers to learn about the “faith of our founders” on the Wallbuilders website, according to the lawsuit.

“The case against WMATA is a critical reminder of what’s at stake when government entities exercise selective censorship,” Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at ACLU-D.C., said in a statement. “The First Amendment doesn’t play favorites; it ensures that all voices, regardless of their message, have the right to be heard.”

The lawsuit includes multiple photos of ads WMATA did find permissible, though they appear to violate its guidelines. These include ads for “The Book of Mormon” musical, which “sharply lampoons” the religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, along with an ad by the Brennan Center for Justice demanding term limits for Supreme Court justices, a “source of substantial public debate,” according to the lawsuit.

“ACLU defends these suits, regardless of whether it agrees with the underlying message because it believes in the speaker’s right to express it,” Spitzer continued. “The government cannot arbitrarily decide which voices to silence in public forums.”

Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty, said in a statement that the First Amendment “grants all Americans the right to express their point of view, religious or secular.”

“Rejecting a faith-based advertising banner by labeling it an ‘issue ad,’ while accepting other ads such as those promoting a ‘Social Justice School,’ ‘Earth Day,’ and the highly controversial idea of terms limits for Supreme Court Justices, is clearly hypocritical, discriminatory, and illegal,” Dys said.

WMATA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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State Of Texas Joins the Federalist, Daily Wire in Suing the Federal Censorship-Industrial Complex


BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 06, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/06/state-of-texas-joins-the-federalist-daily-wire-in-suing-the-federal-censorship-industrial-complex/

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The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.

The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).

This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.

Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”

This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.

Missouri v. Biden found this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.

Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.

The U.S. Justice Department is even about to put a U.S. citizen in prison for sharing election jokes on Twitter.

‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’

The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.

Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.

Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.

[LISTEN: Margot Cleveland Breaks Down Explosive New Federalist Lawsuit Against State Department]

State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.

At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.

They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.

“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.

Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite

Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.

All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.

This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”

While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”

The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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‘Canceling’ People Who Celebrate the Wanton Murder of Women and Children Is Also Free Expression


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | NOVEMBER 02, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/02/canceling-people-who-celebrate-the-wanton-murder-of-women-and-children-is-also-free-expression/

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“Canceling” people who disagree with you over ordinary political issues is bad for civil society. Ruining someone’s life because he wore a MAGA cap or tweeted something stupid or supported the wrong initiative creates an oppressive environment for open discourse.

“Canceling” people who sign petitions and hold up signs that openly celebrate or justify the targeted, brutal murders of women and babies, on the other hand, is good for civil society. Stopping malevolent ideas from being normalized is good. Exercising your First Amendment right to free speech and free association to shun and call out people who spread odious ideas in public life is a moral imperative.

Because people who walk around ripping down posters of kidnapped children and women aren’t pondering the future of a “two-state solution” or the Gazan refugee situation, they are moral degenerates. In the same way you wouldn’t hire the guy who stands in front of Disney World waving around a swastika flag, you shouldn’t hire someone who marches with a sign that reads “from the river to the sea.” Both convey the same sentiment. The ethical line is bright and obvious. If you don’t see it, something is broken in you.

Yet, a bunch of Hamas apologists are calling out conservatives for their alleged hypocrisy on “cancel culture” when it comes to “pro-Palestinian” advocates.

Though I’m not a fan of mobs, I’ve never been a big critic of cancel culture, either. Looking back, I could find only one piece I’ve written on the topic — and it concerned itself with double standards. It’s a slippery term. And there is facet to the debate that’s often overlooked. Americans have no obligation to associate with those who attack their deep-seated values. To hire someone who signs a pro-Hamas petition can be an endorsement of that outlook. Your company is not an open social media platform which exists as a forum for debate, it has a reputation and customers. (Not that I believe the state should be able to compel social media companies to host opinions, either.)

And it’s not as if you asked these people to give you their opinion on genocide. They did so by their own volition. The Harvard petitions blaming Jews for their own murders were signed and released for public consumption. They were released before Israel had even counted the dead, much less invaded Gaza. If law students were celebrating 9/11 on 9/12, would New York firms have a responsibility to provide them with gainful employment? No, they would be rejected in the real world and compelled to get jobs in academia, where such views are welcome.

Of course, the contention that “pro-Palestinian” advocates, or even those who talk about Israel as if it was some authoritarian proto-Nazi state, are being mass canceled is a myth, anyway. They fill the op-ed pages of major newspapers and cable news. They dominate campuses. They aren’t canceled. They are rewarded. When someone like “porn star” Mia Khalifa was “canceled,” it is because she was quite literally rejoicing in the murder of innocent people in real time.

Ibrahim Bharmal, who one suspects is dumber than the average internet prostitute, is the editor of the Harvard Law Review, not some rando trying to wind people up on the internet. He is out there physically and verbally abusing a Jewish student during a pro-Hamas rally on campus like some kind of Brownshirt. Does Harvard have a responsibility to have him on campus? Why should a firm with Jewish partners — or any decent people — hire him?

Harvard, by the way, has assembled a special task force to help students who signed pro-Hamas statements deal with the blowback. Apparently, some people are under the impression they’re the only ones allowed to speak.

The notion that anti-Israel pundits are concerned about double standards, by the way, is risible. You might recall that Harvard rescinded its offer to pro-Second Amendment Parkland kid Kyle Kashuv, ostensibly over things he tweeted as a 16-year-old. No one cared. Today, Georgetown thinks it’s fine to cancel Ilya Shapiro for a single inarticulate tweet, but it will not cancel a professor who complains online about “Zio bitches.” The New York Times cancels an editor for running a column from a sitting senator but hires a writer who praises Hitler (true story).

When I say I’m a free-speech absolutist, I mean it. The state should do absolutely nothing to inhibit or censor pro-Hamas Americans from expressing their opinions. Free speech isn’t contingent on your position. Hate speech is free speech. The government has no business prodding or even suggesting limitations on our rhetorical interactions. Even outside state intervention, we should be upholding the values that promote free expression. We can peacefully coexist with colleagues, neighbors and friends who hold contradictory opinions within the normal parameters of political debate.

Likewise, Americans have a right to use their freedom to call out and disassociate themselves from people who take the side with nihilistic murder cults.

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. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Hate Trump If You Must, But Gag Order Is Still Wrong


By: David Harsanyi / @davidharsanyi / October 20, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/20/hate-trump-if-you-must-but-gag-order-is-still-wrong/

Special counsel Jack Smith (left), seen here Aug. 1 in Washington, D.C., sought a gag order against former President Donald Trump. Trump, seen here Nov. 8, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida, wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: “I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH.” (Photos: Saul Loeb and Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP/Getty Images)

This week, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing United States v. Donald Trump, issued a gag order prohibiting a leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, from engaging in speech aimed at “government staff,” among others, during his trial.

Listen, I understand the disdain some conservatives feel for the former president. I share the sentiment. But if you’re cheering on a judge who’s inhibiting political speech on rickety grounds, you’re no friend of “democracy” or the Constitution.

“Mr. Trump may still vigorously seek public support as a presidential candidate, debate policies and people related to that candidacy, criticize the current administration and assert his belief that this prosecution is politically motivated,” Chutkan explained. “But those critical First Amendment freedoms do not allow him to launch a pretrial smear campaign against participating government staff, their families, and foreseeable witnesses.”

Who is Chutkan to dictate the contours of a presidential candidate’s political speech? What if one of the “participating government staff” or a family member is compromised by partisanship? Moreover, preemptively suggesting that without gagging, Trump will engage in a “smear campaign” is as prejudicial to the case as any of the inflammatory things Trump has thrown around. It implies that any accusation now aimed at prosecutors is untrue.

Trump contends that he is being railroaded by special counsel Jack Smith, the longtime federal prosecutor who works on behalf of Democrats and President Joe Biden. You might believe the special counsel is a chaste defender of Lady Justice, but there’s ample evidence that partisan considerations are in play.

Fears of a politicized Justice Department are real. As we speak, the head of the Democratic Party is being mollycoddled by the state in a very similar case involving classified documents. Whatever the case, the Justice Department now plays a big part in Trump’s campaign for the presidency—and probably his legal case, as well. If the state’s accusations can be spread throughout the media before a trial, why can’t the defendant speak openly, as well?

In the name of fairness, Chutkan contends that Trump does not enjoy unfettered First Amendment rights because he might intimidate witnesses. It’s already illegal to intimidate witnesses. Charge him if he does it. Laws already exist to cover all the other premises Smith has used to rationalize the gag order. The notion that a jury pool is going to be impartial in a trial involving a divisive former president, who is not only a leading contender for the presidency, but one of the most famous people on Earth, is absurd. And the notion a D.C. jury pool will be impartial when it comes to Trump is fantastical.

There is little that can be done about it. But further gagging the defendant only feeds, at the very minimum, the perception that this is all politically motivated.

Establishment media inform us that the gag order is just “narrow” and meant to “protect the integrity of the trial and the jury pool.” 1In her Solomonic wisdom, Chutkan cut the state’s request in half. A “narrow” gag order limiting free speech is still a gag order limiting free speech. The fact that Smith was seeking even broader limitations only makes Trump’s claims more plausible.

Smith has also argued that Trump should not be afforded “special treatment” because he’s a candidate. He’s right. No one’s right to defend themselves or to engage in speech should be inhibited, not even during trials (though any good lawyer will tell clients, for their own good, to shut up). Still, gag orders are almost always an unconstitutional prior restraint. For years, the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups argued the same.

I’m sure many people simply believe Trump deserves it. Think, though, about the precedent: Administrations can now launch prosecutions against political rivals—calibrated to take place in favorable cities and timed to coincide with elections—and then demand gag orders be implemented on those running for office.

If you think they won’t do it to others, you haven’t been paying attention.

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David Harsanyi@davidharsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”

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California’s Pro-Trans Child Custody Bill Is Pure Emotional Blackmail


BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/15/californias-pro-trans-child-custody-bill-is-pure-emotional-blackmail/

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There’s a bill sitting on Gavin Newsom’s desk right now that would not only render the First Amendment null and void but also strip parents of their most fundamental rights and responsibilities toward their children. It’s not a matter of if the far-left California governor will sign it, but when.

The bill, the Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act (AB 957) — which last week passed the Senate and then, on a party-line vote, the Assembly — dictates that courts must consider “gender affirmation” in child custody battles. The soon-to-be-law states that in seeking to determine the “health, safety, and welfare of the child,” courts must consider “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression.”

While some Democrat apologists in the media pretend it’s absurd to think this means conservative parents would ever lose custody of their children by nature of holding conservative values — It doesn’t say judges *have* to side with the loving, accepting parents, you hateful rubes! — we know how this will go. It’s California, for crying out loud.

But we don’t have to extrapolate much. Other media have dropped the facade and told us exactly where this bill will lead. Here’s CNBC:

Under the proposed law, parents, who fail to acknowledge and support their child’s gender transition, could face potential consequences, including the loss of custody rights to another parent or even the state itself. The bill’s supporters argue that it is in the best interest of children, aiming to create a more inclusive and affirming environment for gender-diverse youth.

There’s the quiet part out loud: A mom or dad who opts not to indulge their child in mental illness, who uses the child’s given name, prohibits the use of puberty blockers, or discourages sterilizing hormones or surgery could lose the child not only to the other parent, which is egregious enough — but to the state.

As Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has pointed out, this law would stomp on the Constitution’s guarantee to free speech and the free exercise of religion. It would “muzzle” parents and prevent them from rearing their children in accordance with their deeply held beliefs — beliefs, by the way, that have been regarded by both Christians and non-Christians as basic laws of nature and fundamentals of civil society until about five minutes ago. This is more than a legal dilemma for Constitutional scholars and gender-studies midwits to bat around in mahogany rooms and shoddy amici, however. If it feels more nefarious and personal — that’s because it is. We’ve seen it before.

It’s classic Democrat emotional blackmail. It’s the left waging psychological warfare on its ideological opponents with barely veiled threats. Oh, you want to see your own child? Well, that’s interesting because xir needs some hormones xe says you won’t provide. You don’t seem too concerned with xir’s health and safety.

This brand of emotional blackmail has already been tested and perfected with the suicide card. That is, the aforementioned gender-studies “experts,” medical professionals, journalists, and other Very Smart People™ have decided, based on little to no evidence, that transgender medical interventions are the only acceptable course of action for confused kids. In fact, anything short of full “affirmation” is deadly, they say.

With this conclusion in mind — and at the expense of mounting evidence showing pro-trans policies cause the most harm — they’ve devised “research” that Democrats then present as unassailable. The methodology of these biased studies is wildly problematic. Pro-trans ideologues habitually equate correlation with causation, fail to treat gender dysphoria as a mental illness and ignore underlying mental health issues such as depression, discount the potential role of wrong-sex hormones in unhealthy ideations, ignore hard facts about the ways puberty eventually resolves almost all dysphoria in minors, discounts rampant social factors, and turns a blind eye to the growing chorus of detransitioners who fell for leftist lies and are now filled with despair.

[READ: Telling Kids To Hate Their Biology Might Be What’s Actually Killing Them]

But never let bad science get in the way of an agenda. Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?, they manipulate. A lack of acceptance has driven trans suicide rates and self-harm through the roof.

A law this unconstitutional is bound to wind up in the courts. And I suppose we should be thankful there’s one remaining recourse. But if all conservatives have on their side is a waiting game until the courts eventually slap California lawmakers on the wrist, they have nothing. In fact, getting GOP-opposed laws tied up in the slow gears of the court system is exactly what Democrats are expecting. They’re counting on it. The more they can keep conservatives and jurists busy, the more radical laws and policies they can keep shoving out the door. We can’t stop them all. How many poor parents and children will be casualties in the meantime?

But don’t lose the human element in the legislative games. Rabid ideologues and iconoclasts who want to remake America and its children in their own image aren’t afraid to use the most vulnerable among us as pawns. Self-censorship will only be the start. It’s emotional blackmail, plain and simple. Do what we say, or else.

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.

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I’d Like to Call Human Resources on Hostile HR Thought Police


BY: CHASE SPEARS | AUGUST 28, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/28/id-like-to-call-human-resources-on-hostile-hr-thought-police/

New York National Guard

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The theme of my career over the past year has been the transition of departing military service and reintegrating among the civilian populace. As I approached this season, I have heard one particular phrase frequently circulated among much of corporate communication: “Bring your authentic self to work.”

But more recently I have heard cautions for those of us in uniform to be anything but open as we return to the society from which we were drawn. I find this deeply concerning. The nation should beware of prioritizing deception as social currency. 

Last summer I began attending the transition briefings required prior to separation from the service. At one particular event, a retired military man — now working for a large national company — warned us that it’s very important to keep a low social media profile because of perceptual risk from hiring managers. He told of unfriending his sister on Facebook because he didn’t want anyone from his workplace to associate them with each other. That moment got my attention.

If the sister posts deviant content, I would probably keep some distance in online spaces for the sake of my sanity. But what if the sister is merely someone who expresses facts that just happen to be inconvenient to the current sociopolitical moment? We have seen time and again that facts disputed by corporate media, social media companies, and government officials frequently turn out to be true.   

The call to sacrificially appease the human resources syndicate renewed itself in another employment seminar I attended this year. Again, I encountered the caution through a LinkedIn discussion. I was warned that employers fear that an employee who expresses a thought on his or her own time might also express a thought in the workplace. Such thinking from clearly well-intentioned people seems backward to me, as if we should not encounter ideas and ways of thinking that might challenge our own.

People of faith-directed moral principles routinely encounter rhetoric that is contrary to their own beliefs and sometimes condescending. The reality is that many companies, corporations, and government institutions tolerate “politically correct” expressions in the workplace while shaming voices aligned with a traditional worldview. My time in the U.S. Army contains such instances, and I’m not alone.

This is in spite of protections offered by the U.S. Constitution, civil law, and military regulation. Culture and political sway always trump the rules. When you look at where people are being pressured, disciplined, or fired for sharing their beliefs at work, it is usually an incident of discrimination against speaking the truth by military commanders or civilian managers who have adopted a form of leftist social orthodoxy.  

Part of the argument for why we should present as neutral in online spaces revolves around a belief that people cannot be taught how to engage productively on tough issues. Society has lost the ability to think, reason, and respectfully debate. Shall we then remove anything related to thinking skills from educational curriculum? The point of identifying a deficiency is so that it can be addressed. We should not accept a lack of skills in dialogue and thought as normal and then strike them from the list of disciplines to be pursued. Because one generation has not been taught something important does not mean people should abandon it entirely.  

Rather than calling for an end to societal discourse, we should work to recapture the skill. I am not advocating that we bring cable news-style fights to the job site or that everyone abandons all expressive caution, manner, and restraint. But we must end the fear and spirals of silence that have become too frequent across workplaces, especially for workers who hold to a morality that was understood to be normal until 15 minutes ago.

By overusing a mantra that demands we avoid talking about religion or politics at the dinner table, we have robbed entire generations of the chance to develop the intellectual discipline that is foundational to reasoning and thought. These skills were expected of all citizens in the early republic. The nation’s current deficit in the tools of discourse paved the way for a cultural capture of the West at the hands of confessional Marxists. In their own words, such people aim to deconstruct and dismantle rather than defend and preserve.  

Deliberately or unwittingly, those who argue in favor of self-neutrality demonstrate a worldview that places all power and personal allegiance in the hands of employers. Of course, there is wisdom in avoiding individuals who demonstrate a lack of restraint or courtesy in their manner of expression. But telling people that their employment is purchased with a lifestyle of silence is an elevation of employer to magistrate and priest. It turns employees into quieted servants and enables a soft social credit system that reduces human beings to machines. Such thinking is among the reasons my transition is focused on finding a mission rather than a corporate role.

The Greek general and politician Pericles is quoted as saying, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own affairs; we say that he has no business here at all.” The problem is not so much that managers have an aversion to politics. It is that secularists generally have an aversion to ideas that contradict the prevailing winds of culture. They live convinced that policy advocacy on matters in alignment with their belief is not a matter of politics but of principle. The two, however, are inseparable. When one tells you to keep your principles to yourself, that itself is an ideological competitor’s political act of silencing you.

Beliefs turn into expressed ideas, which beget social doctrines. The First Amendment is of little meaning if we make it inferior to social demands of the moment. As a nation, we should beware of allowing momentary fears to become anchored going forward, and we should refuse to cede moral principles to satisfy the increasingly leftist human resources syndicate.  

Chase Spears is a retiring U.S. Army officer, concluding a 20-year career in military public affairs. His opinions are his own and should not be construed to be those of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, U.S. Government, or any other affiliated agencies.

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6 Takeaways from the Biden Admin’s Court Quest to Keep Censoring Americans Online


BY: JOY PULLMANN | AUGUST 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/14/6-takeaways-from-the-biden-admins-court-quest-to-keep-censoring-americans-online/

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On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.

In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.

“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).

Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.

1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring

Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?

“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”

Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”

Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”

That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).

Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.

2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates

The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”

The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.

Joe Biden even threatened to hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.

“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”

3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters

Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.

“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”

Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

4. Censorship Is Election Interference

The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.

“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”

When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”

Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.

“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.

5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies

The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.

Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.

As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:

According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.

The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?

6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged

Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.

It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.

Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.

Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.

“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.

“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax: ‘No Such Thing as a False Idea or False Opinion’


By Eric Mack    |   Wednesday, 09 August 2023 03:40 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-indictment-first-amendment/2023/08/09/id/1130210/

Amid allegations President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has spied on former President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account, constitutional legal expert Alan Dershowitz chimed in on Newsmax.

“I can’t imagine there’d be anything in his Twitter account which isn’t public, but if there is something, they should have to justify that: Government can’t just go rummaging through people’s First Amendment statements,” Dershowitz told Wednesday’s “John Bachman Now.”

“But this is a First Amendment case,” he continued, rejecting former Attorney General Bill Barr’s claim to the contrary.

“This is a case all about what Donald Trump said, what he believed. Even the things he did, he did, according to him, because he honestly believed, and still believes, the election was stolen.

“He was wrong, in my view, but my view doesn’t matter under the First Amendment.”

Trump’s election challenge speech, and subsequent seeking of legal remedies, is protected, according to Dershowitz.

“Under the First Amendment, there’s no such thing as a false idea or a false opinion,” Dershowitz told co-hosts Bianca de la Garza and John Huddy.

“The remedy for false ideas and false opinions is to respond to them and write better ideas and better opinions, not to criminalize what somebody said or did consistent with his belief that the election was stolen.”

Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan cannot be trusted to give Trump his right to a fair trial, Dershowitz continued.

“I am a liberal Democrat who has voted for Democrats all my life. I do not trust her; I do not trust her to do justice,” he said. “The test is not only must justice be done, must it seem to be done. I don’t see it being done.”

Chutkan has concerning ties to a law firm “that has had the most conflicts of interest, in my opinion, of any major firm in the United States,” in addition to ties to Hunter Biden and clients and cases tied to Burisma Holdings, according to Dershowitz.

“This is exactly the wrong person to preside over this case,” he warned. “This case is going to be decided largely by the judge, by what instructions the judge gives.

“So, this case should be taken away from her. She should be recused, and she should not be deciding issues that divide the American people. Because they’re not going to trust her judgment.”

The case should be moved out of Washington, D.C., to grant Trump a fair trial, Dershowitz added.

“The case should be taken out of the District of Columbia, to which is 95% anti-Trump, and put in West Virginia or Virginia or some purple area, where at least there’s a shot at getting a fair trial, like there is in Florida, in the county where the trial is going to be taking place in Florida.

“But you know Manhattan and the District of Columbia, I can’t imagine two districts more anti-Trump and more unfair to Trump. The American public is not going to trust them.”

Even though the decision to recuse is in the hand of Chutkan, Dershowitz said keeping it under her hand will leave it open to preemptive appeal all the way up the U.S. judicial system.

“It’s her decision, but it can be appealable,” he said. “If she doesn’t recuse herself and if there’s a conviction, there could be an appeal.

“There’s also some argument that can be made — of course, today, lawyers trying to make creative arguments, they get indicted,” he added, noting the basis of special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment listing Trump’s lawyers as alleged co-conspirators, “but there’s some argument that could be made that if there’s a motion to recuse her and she refuses it, that is appealable or subject to a writ of mandamus right away.

“There are cases all ways on that, and so that’s one other possibility that could be explored.”

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Judge Andrew P. Napolitano Op-ed: Constitution Valueless if Gov’t Negates It


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Judge Andrew P. Napolitano By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano | Monday, 07 August 2023 03:52 PM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/judgeandrewpnapolitano/facebook-madison-wilson/2023/08/07/id/1129918/

“Congress shall make no law  . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Here is a pop quiz: If the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution repealing the First Amendment, would we still enjoy the freedom of speech?

That depends on which value prevails: Are our rights only what lawmakers have written down, or are they personal attributes immune from government reach?

When James Madison was crafting the First Amendment, he insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in order to manifest the Framers’ belief that the freedom of speech pre-existed the government. The First Amendment is a negative right.

It doesn’t grant the freedom of speech.

Rather, it restrains Congress from abridging a right that preexisted Congress.

So, what is a right, and where does it come from?

A right is an indefeasible personal claim against the whole world.

It does not require a government permission slip or any precondition or community consensus — only the ability to reason.

It belongs to every human by virtue of our existence.

Privileges — like voting or driving an automobile — come from the government. Rights come from our humanity. Madison included the word “the” before “freedom of speech” in order to underscore its natural — not governmental — origins.

If you accept the existence of the natural law — a body of unchanging moral principles universally knowable by the exercise of reason — you accept that natural rights are ours to exercise whether the government is expressly prohibited from interfering with them or not.

So, under the natural law, murder would still be wrong and unlawful, even if the government were to permit itself and others to kill, as, of course, governments have done and continue to do.

Under the natural law, the answer to our pop quiz is that because the freedom of speech is a natural human right, it exists and is free from government interference whether the prohibition on interference is written down or not.

Is natural law in the Constitution?

Yes.

The Ninth Amendment — Madison’s crown jewel — recognizes the existence of personal human rights too numerous to articulate, and it prohibits the government from denying or disparaging them.

The opposite of natural law is positivism.

It teaches that law is only that which has been written down and ratified by the law giver.

Under positivism, there is no natural law restraint upon the government; right and wrong are only and always whatever the government says they are.

Under positivism, the answer to our pop quiz is that the freedom of speech would be fair game for the government to abridge.

The freedom of speech — to think as you wish, to say what you think, to offer what you say — is so normal, so human, so integral to the very existence of each of us, who cares what the government thinks of it?

Yet, today, the government thinks very little of the freedom of speech, even though all in government —from the president on down to a part-time government janitor — have sworn allegiance to the Constitution.

Today, even though the First Amendment only verbally addresses Congress, the freedom of speech is protected from all government infringement —whether local, state or federal; whether legislative, executive or judicial.

President Woodrow Wilson, who infamously had Princeton University students arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence aloud outside draft offices in Trenton, New Jersey, claiming they might deter men from registering for the draft, argued that the First Amendment only restrained Congress, not the president.

Today, such an argument is hogwash.

I offer this brief philosophical and historical discourse on the freedom of speech as background in order to address how this basic freedom is under attack by the government today.

Today, the attacks on free speech are often silent and unseen, as the government attempts to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly.

In a case involving Facebook now making its way through the federal courts in Texas, we have learned that the Biden administration pressured Facebook executives to suppress free speech about COVID-19 vaccines.

The suppressed speech offered an alternative view to that which the government preferred. Rather than competing in the marketplace of ideas, the government chose to use its bully power to suppress the speech that it hated or feared or with which it disagreed.

This is government interference with speech because of its content.

The U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that, except for a state interest of the highest order — protecting the secrecy of troop movements in wartime, for example — the government is absolutely prohibited from interfering with speech because of its content.

The government claims it was just pointing out errors in scientific materials to Facebook. But that is not government’s job.

The government does not enjoy the freedom of speech; only individuals do.

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of speech so that individuals can decide for themselves what to say and hear.

Facebook is not the government.

It’s free to censor all it wants. But when it does so to get the government off its back, it thereby acquires an attribute of the government, and a court can impose First Amendment restrictions upon it.

Stated differently, if Facebook and the feds are in a mutually beneficial relationship, they will both lose.

The feds will be restrained by a court — as the Biden administration was — for interfering with the content of speech, and Facebook will lose its ability to censor the content of its own bulletin boards.

Why do we elect persons to protect the Constitution who end up cutting holes in it?

What value is the Constitution if the government can negate it?

Whose speech will the government undermine next?

To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey. He is the author of five books on the U.S. Constitution. Read Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s Reports — More Here.

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Senator Rand Paul, M.D., Op-ed: Congress Must Stop The Executive Branch’s Heinous Attempts To Censor Americans


BY: RAND PAUL | JULY 25, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/25/congress-must-stop-the-executive-branchs-heinous-attempts-to-censor-americans/

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The First Amendment’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” is a guarantee that, no matter how inconvenient to those temporarily holding high office, the people have an absolute right to express their thoughts and opinions. Despite this constitutional requirement, over 200 years ago, President John Adams and the Federalists in Congress used the threat of war with France as a pretext to enact into law the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for Americans to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.

The debate surrounding the Sedition Act was about the nature of freedom of speech. One supporter of the law, Alexander Addison, believed that some opinions were so dangerous that it was in the public interest to suppress them, stating, “Truth has but one side: and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.”

An opponent, Thomas Cooper, presciently argued that the purpose of the Sedition Act was to empower one party to “suppress the opinions of those who differ from them.” Unsurprisingly, all the defendants prosecuted under the Sedition Act would be Republicans.

Sound familiar?

On Independence Day this year, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction restricting the Biden Administration from collaborating with social media companies to censor and suppress constitutionally protected speech. In his opinion, Judge Terry Doughty stated that the Biden Administration’s efforts to suppress opinions it opposes “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in the United States’ history.” It is difficult to disagree with Judge Doughty’s description.

For years, the Biden Administration demanded social media suppress and censor conservatives who dared question the origins of Covid, the effectiveness of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity, among other issues. The Biden Administration was so zealous in its enforcement of censorship, even parody content did not escape its anti-free speech campaign.

And the Biden administration didn’t ask nicely. When then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly called on social media companies to censor speech relating to Covid, she mentioned Biden’s support for a “robust anti-trust program,” all but threatening to break up tech giants if they failed to adopt the administration’s censorship policies. Later, the White House announced that it was reviewing policies relating to whether social media should be held legally liable for spreading so-called misinformation. In other words, the Biden administration effectively told social media “Do our bidding, or else.”

The White House was so aggressive that a Twitter representative stated the site was “bombarded” with censorship requests from the executive branch. But that bombardment was not really directed at Twitter — it was a monstrous attack on the free speech rights guaranteed to every American by the First Amendment.

In addition to countless numbers of Americans, I was targeted by the censorship regime. When I posted a video on YouTube to educate the public on the potentially harmful consequences of relying on ineffective cloth masks to prevent transmission of Covid, YouTube took my video down and suspended me for a week.

Americans are a free people and we do not take infringements upon our liberties lightly. The time has come for resistance and to reclaim our God-given right to free expression. Permit me, as a member of the resistance, to present a solution that that restores and protects the First Amendment.

I introduced legislation called the Free Speech Protection Act, which will prohibit federal employees and contractors from using their positions to censor and otherwise attack speech protected by the First Amendment. My legislation will impose penalties for those that violate this rule, as well as empower private citizens to sue the government and executive branch officials for violating their First Amendment rights. Additionally, the bill will mandate frequent publicly accessible reports detailing the communications between an executive branch agency and media organizations, ensure that federal grant money is not used to label media organizations as sources of misinformation or disinformation, and terminates authorities that threaten free speech.

Under my Free Speech Protection Act, the government will no longer be able to cloak itself in secrecy to undermine the First Amendment rights of conservatives, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and all others who wish to exercise their right to free speech and engage in public discourse.

My legislation will make it difficult to hide efforts to censor constitutionally protected speech. Those officials who censor Americans are on notice: if you infringe upon First Amendment rights, under my bill, you will face severe penalties, such as potential debarment from employment by the United States, a civil penalty of no less than $10,000, and revocation of a security clearance. Any administration employee who prizes his livelihood would not dare threaten free speech after my bill becomes law.

Looking back upon his defeat of John Adams for the presidency, Thomas Jefferson wrote, the “revolution of 1800 . . . was a real revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76.” Jefferson’s victory was a vindication of the First Amendment as he allowed the Sedition Act to expire and pardoned those convicted for expressing their views.

Once again, the American people are called upon to defend the founding principles over which our forebears fought a revolution. To protect free speech, Congress must prohibit the government’s collusion with Big Tech and other media organizations. Congress must pass the Free Speech Protection Act.

Rand Paul, MD, is a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

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Biden’s FTC Punished Twitter For Seceding From The Censorship Complex


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND| JULY 17, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/17/bidens-ftc-punished-twitter-for-seceding-from-the-censorship-complex/

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The Federal Trade Commission inappropriately pressured an independent third-party auditing firm to find Twitter had violated the terms of its settlement agreement with the FTC, a motion filed last week in federal court reveals. That misconduct and the FTC’s own repudiation of the terms of the settlement agreement entitle Twitter to vacate the consent order, its lawyers maintain. This latest development holds significance beyond Twitter’s fight with the FTC, however, with the details providing further evidence that the Biden administration targeted Twitter because of its owner Elon Musk’s support for free speech on his platform.

I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency. Roque’s testimony prompted attorneys for Twitter to seek documents from the FTC to assess whether the federal agency had repeated its pressure campaign with EY’s successors, but the agency refused to provide any details to the social media giant. Twitter responded last week by filing a “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order.” 

That motion and its accompanying exhibits provide shocking details of an abusive agency targeting Twitter. When those facts are coupled with the report on the FTC issued earlier this year by the House Weaponization Subcommittee, it seems clear the Biden administration is targeting Twitter because Musk seceded from the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

FTC’s Pre-Musk Enforcement Actions

Thursday’s motion began with the background necessary to appreciate the gravity of the FTC’s scorched-earth campaign against Twitter. 

More than a decade ago, the FTC entered into a settlement agreement with Twitter after finding Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by misrepresenting the extent it protected user information from unauthorized access. That 2011 settlement agreement resulted in a consent order that required Twitter to establish a “comprehensive information security program” that met specific parameters. The 2011 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment from an independent third-party professional confirming compliance with the terms of the settlement agreement. 

From 2011 to 2019, Twitter operated under the 2011 consent order and received about 10 “demand letters” from the FTC seeking additional information. Then in October 2019, Twitter informed the FTC that “some email addresses and phone numbers provided for account security may have been used unintentionally for advertising purposes.” In investigating that report, the FTC sent Twitter another 15 or so demand letters over a two-year period before filing a complaint in a California federal court on May 25, 2022, alleging Twitter had violated the 2011 consent order and Section 5 of the FTC Act by misrepresenting the extent to which Twitter maintained and protected the privacy of nonpublic consumer information. 

The next day, the court entered a “Stipulated Order” — meaning Twitter and the FTC had agreed to the terms of that order — “for Civil Penalty, Monetary Judgment, and Injunctive Relief.” That stipulated order allowed the FTC to reopen the 2011 proceeding and enter an updated consent order, which created a new “compliance structure.”

Under the 2022 order, Twitter was required to establish and maintain a “comprehensive privacy and information security program” to “protect[] the privacy, security, confidentiality, and integrity” of certain user information by Nov. 22, 2022. The 2022 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment of its compliance with the terms of the court order by “qualified, objective, independent third-party professionals.”

Musk Makes Waves

Musk entered into an agreement on April 25, 2022, to purchase Twitter, effective Oct. 27, 2022, and one must wonder if that April agreement prompted Twitter’s then-management to enter the May 2022 consent decree, as Twitter’s prior management handcuffed Musk to the terms of the agreement forged with the FTC. Either way, the May 2022 consent order governed Twitter’s operations under Musk’s new management. 

While the 2022 consent decree remained unchanged after Musk’s purchase became final, the FTC’s posture toward Twitter changed drastically. As Twitter’s Thursday motion detailed, “in the five months between the signing of the Consent Order on May 25, 2022, and Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Inc. on October 27, 2022, the FTC sent Twitter only three demand letters.”

All three letters concerned a whistleblower’s claims that Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and the 2011 consent order by making false and misleading statements about its security, privacy, and integrity. The FTC waited nearly two months after receiving the whistleblower’s complaint before serving its first demand letter on Twitter.

FTC Goes Scorched Earth

According to Twitter’s motion for relief from the 2022 consent order, “Musk’s acquisition of Twitter produced a sudden and drastic change in the tone and intensity of the FTC’s investigation into the company.” Among other things, the FTC publicly stated it was “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.” The FTC also stressed that the revised consent order provided the agency with “new tools to ensure compliance,” and it was “prepared to use them.”

And use them the FTC did: The agency immediately issued two demand letters to Twitter seeking information about workforce reductions and the launch of Twitter Blue. Those demand letters came before Twitter was even required under the 2022 consent decree to have its new programs in place. Since then, Twitter’s attorneys note, the FTC has pummeled Twitter’s corporate owner, X Corp., with “burdensome demand letters” — more than 17 separate demand letters, with some 200 individual demands for information and documents, translates into a new demand letter every two weeks.

FTC Starts Drilling Former Employees

In addition to the FTC’s flurry of demand letters, it began deposing former Twitter employees — five to date — and is currently seeking to question Musk. The FTC also deposed Roque on June 21, 2023, but the questioning backfired. Twitter learned from that deposition, as its lawyers put it in Thursday’s motion, “that the FTC’s harassment campaign was even more extreme and far-reaching than it had imagined.”

Roque was the Ernst & Young partner overseeing the assessment it was hired by Twitter to perform — an assessment mandated by the May 2022 consent decree. Twitter’s previous management retained EY in July 2022 to issue the assessment report of its security measures. 

In late February 2023, EY withdrew from the engagement. Many of the FTC’s questions to Roque probed the reasoning for the withdrawal, including the high number of personnel changes and EY’s difficulty in starting the assessment because of Twitter upheaval caused by Musk’s changes.

Deposition Backfires Big Time 

During the FTC’s question of Roque about EY’s withdrawal from the engagement and various emails exchanged by partners, the longtime CPA dropped a bombshell: The FTC had so pressured Roque to reach its preconceived conclusion that Twitter had violated the consent decree that Roque sought help researching the ethical standards that govern CPAs to assess whether EY’s independence had been compromised.

Roque revealed that detail when the FTC’s lawyer quizzed him on the meaning of a chat message exchange he had with fellow EY partner Paul Penler on the evening of Feb. 21, 2023, shortly before the Big Four firm announced it was withdrawing from its engagement to assess Twitter’s compliance with the 2022 consent order. 

While the actual chat message was filed under seal as Exhibit 16 in support of Twitter’s motion, the transcript of Roque’s questioning was provided to the court, revealing the pertinent aspects of the conversation.

Roque began by asking Penler, “Where is the best place to confirm independence consideration for attest engagement?” About 15 minutes later, Roque followed up by asking whether specific language about an “adverse interest threat” “could work for Twitter?” Roque then commented to Penler that “EY interests are not aligned with Twitter anymore because of the FTC.”

Mild-Mannered CPA Drops Bombshell 

After showing Roque a copy of his chat exchange with Penler, the FTC attorney quizzed the EY partner on why he had sent the note and what he meant by the various lines. That’s when the bomb exploded, with Roque explaining he had contacted Penler — who was with EY’s professional practice group, the internal group that was responsible for ensuring the firm adequately followed professional standards — because Roque had concerns about whether the FTC had threatened his independence.

“As we were moving forward with this engagement, we had ongoing discussions with the FTC,” Roque explained. “[D]uring those discussions,” Roque continued, “the FTC kept expressing their opinion more and more adamantly about the extent of procedures Ernst & Young would need to perform based on their expectations. And there was also expectations around the results they would expect us to find based on the information Twitter had already provided to the FTC and the FTC had reviewed.” 

Those conversations, Roque testified, made him feel “as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” so he was attempting to assess whether EY had an “adverse threat,” meaning “somebody outside of the arrangement we had with Twitter trying to influence the outcome of our results.” 

FTC Spin Falls Flat

After Roque revealed his concerns about the FTC’s conduct, the lawyer for the federal agency pushed him to backtrack by asking leading questions. Rather than hedge, Roque stood firm, as these exchanges show:

FTC Attorney: “To be clear, no one from the FTC directed you to reach a particular conclusion about Twitter’s 22 program, correct?”

Roque: “There was suggestions of what they would expect the outcome to be.”

* * *

FTC Attorney: “No one from the FTC actually told you what EY’s report should say in its conclusions, correct?” 

Roque: “There was a conversation where it was conveyed that the FTC would be surprised if there was areas on our report that didn’t have findings based on information the FTC was already aware of, and if Ernst & Young didn’t have findings in those areas, we should expect the FTC would follow up very significantly to understand why we didn’t have similar conclusions.”

Twitter’s Lawyer Pounces

After two fails, the FTC moved on to other questions, but Twitter’s lawyer, Daniel Koffmann, returned to the topic when it was his turn to question Roque. Koffmann asked Roque whether there was a particular meeting with the FTC in which the agency had given him the impression that it “was expecting a certain outcome in the assessment that Ernst & Young was conducting relative to Twitter’s compliance with the consent order.” 

Roque mentioned two meetings. He described the first, which was in December 2022, as “interesting” and “surprising” because when EY noted that Twitter, under its new ownership, might opt to terminate its contract with the firm, the FTC was “very adamant about this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day.” Roque found the FTC’s stance “a bit surprising,” since the report was not due for another six to seven months and the federal agency would not know what might transpire during that time period.

Roque further explained that he found the December 2022 meeting “unusual” because the FTC provided “specificity on the execution of very specific types of procedures that they expected to be performed.”

“It was almost as if they were giving us components of our audit program to execute,” Roque said. While EY could perform such a review, it would be a different type of engagement than the one it had entered with Twitter. Rather, EY’s assessment for Twitter was to access, for instance, how security operates and how the user administration process is managed. In conducting that assessment, the firm would look at specific controls. But the FTC was giving EY very specific tests to run, which was inconsistent with a typical audit, Roque explained.

It was the second meeting, which took place in January 2022, that raised real concerns for Roque. It was then, Roque said, that the FTC “started providing areas that they were expecting us to look at.” Roque testified that the FTC “communicated that they would expect Ernst & Young to have findings or exceptions or negative results in certain areas based on what they already understood from an operational standpoint, based on information Twitter had provided, and that if we ended up producing a report that didn’t have findings in those areas, that they would be surprised, and they would be definitely following up with us to understand why we didn’t — why we reached the conclusions we did if they were sort of not reflecting gaps in the controls.”

Roque would go on to agree with Twitter’s attorney that during the January 2022 meeting, “the representatives from the FTC expressed that they believed Ernst & Young’s assessment would lead to findings or exceptions about Twitter’s compliance with the consent order.” 

Twitter Takes FTC to Task

A little over a week after Roque’s deposition, Twitter’s legal team wrote the FTC a scathing letter noting that Roque’s alarming testimony “demonstrates that the FTC has resorted to bullying tactics, intimidation, and threats to potential witnesses.”

“It strongly suggests that the FTC has attempted to exert improper influence over witnesses in order to manufacture evidence damaging to X Corp. and Mr. Musk,” the letter continued, adding that Roque’s testimony also raised serious questions about whether the FTC’s bias would render any future enforcement action unconstitutional.

The Twitter letter ended by requesting documents and information from the FTC “to evaluate the nature and scope of the FTC’s misconduct and the remedial measures that will be necessary.” Among other things, Twitter asked for communications between FTC personnel and the company that succeeded EY as Twitter’s independent assessor, as well as another company Twitter considered but did not select to replace EY.

The FTC refused Twitter’s request. In its letter denying Musk access to any documents, Reenah L. Kim, the same attorney who allegedly made the statements to Roque, claimed Twitter’s accusations of so-called “bullying tactics, intimidation, and threats to potential witnesses” by the FTC “are completely unfounded.” 

Lots of Legal Implications

Following the FTC’s refusal to provide Twitter the requested documents, Musk’s legal team filed its “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order” with the California federal court where the 2022 consent decree had been entered. In this recently filed motion, Musk’s attorneys argue the FTC “breached” the consent order when it attempted “to dictate and influence the content, procedures, and outcome” of the court-ordered assessment, which the consent decree required to be both “objective” and “independent.”

To support its argument, Twitter highlighted the FTC’s own language in an earlier letter the agency had sent to Twitter’s prior management team discussing the importance of the same “independence” requirement from the first consent decree. That order was clear, the FTC wrote, that “Twitter must obtain periodic security assessments ‘from a qualified, objective, independent third-party professional.’”

The “assessor must be an independent third party — not an employee or agent of either Twitter or the FTC,” the letter continued, adding that if the auditor were indeed an agent of Twitter, “Twitter would be in violation of the Order’s requirement that it obtain a security assessment from an ‘independent third-party’ professional.” The FTC then stressed: “The very purpose of a security or privacy order’s assessment provision is to ensure that evaluation of a respondent’s security or privacy program is truly objective — i.e., unaffected by the interests (or litigation positions) of either the respondent or the FTC.” 

The FTC’s interference with EY’s independence thus constituted a violation of the 2022 consent decree, Twitter’s legal team argued, justifying the court vacating that order — or at a minimum modifying it. Twitter also argued in its motion that as a matter of fairness, the consent decree should be set aside given the FTC’s outrageously aggressive demands for documents, compared to its posture toward Twitter prior to Musk’s purchase. 

That motion remains pending before federal Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon, with a hearing set for next month.

Connection to the Censorship Complex

While Twitter’s Thursday motion does not directly connect to the Censorship-Industrial Complex, the FTC’s posture toward Twitter changed following news that Musk intended to purchase the tech giant to make it a free-speech zone. And when Roque’s testimony is considered against the backdrop of evidence previously exposed by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, it seems clear the Biden administration sought to punish Twitter for exiting from the government’s whole-of-society plan to censor supposed misinformation.

The House subcommittee’s March 2023 report, titled “The Weaponization of the Federal Trade Commission: An Agency’s Overreach to Harass Elon Musk’s Twitter,” established the FTC had requested the names of every journalist Musk had provided access to internal communications, which had led to the earth-shattering revelations contained in the “Twitter Files.” Many of the FTC’s other demands, the House report concluded, also “had little to no nexus to users’ privacy and information.” The report thus concluded that the “strong inference” “is that Twitter’s rediscovered focus on free speech [was] being met with politically motivated attempts to thwart Elon Musk’s goals.” 

Know-Nothing Khan

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, attempted to question FTC Chair Lina Khan on Thursday about the agency’s apparent interference with EY’s independence and its connection to the federal government’s efforts to silence speech.

“The FTC has engaged in conduct so irregular and improper that Ernst & Young (‘EY’) — the independent assessor designated under a consent order between Twitter and the FTC to evaluate the company’s privacy, data protection, and information security program — ‘felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,’” Jordan said.

But Khan claimed she knew nothing about Roque or his deposition testimony. 

That doesn’t change the fact that the FTC has been laser-focused on Twitter since Musk revolted against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Whether Twitter will convince the California federal court that the FTC’s conduct justifies tearing up the consent decree, however, remains to be seen.

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.

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12 Times The Biden White House Colluded With Big Tech To Throttle Free Speech, According To Missouri v. Biden


BY: EVITA DUFFY-ALFONSO | JULY 07, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/07/12-times-the-biden-white-house-colluded-with-big-tech-to-throttle-free-speech-according-to-missouri-v-biden/

Big Tech free speech

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A preliminary injunction issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty explicitly prohibits the White House and several federal agencies from violating the First Amendment by directing social media companies to censor Americans. 

Up to and even after the injunction’s release, Democrats have insisted that any suggestion the federal government is colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives (or pretty much any information inconvenient to the current administration) is a “conspiracy” theory. However, in his injunction, Judge Doughty cited shocking evidence that the deep state’s collusion with Big Tech is very much real. Here are 12 of the dozens of damning instances cited by the judge that demonstrate the severity of our government’s illegal partnership with Big Tech. 

1. White House Orders RFK Tweet Removal ‘ASAP’

On Jan. 23, 2021, the White House requested Twitter remove a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that was critical of Covid-19 vaccines. “Hey folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” wrote a Biden official. The White House also expressed a desire to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”

2. White House Requests ‘Immediate’ Ban On Biden Family Member Parody Account 

On Feb. 6, 2021, the White House asked Twitter to ban a “parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter.”

“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” the official wrote to Twitter. “Please remove this account immediately.” The account was banned within 45 minutes, Doughty noted. 

3. Twitter Streamlines White House Censorship Requests  

On Feb. 7, 2021, Twitter provided the White House with a “Twitter’s Partner Support Portal” that, according to the injunction, “expedited review of flagging content for censorship.” The portal was created because Twitter felt overwhelmed by the large volume of censorship requests coming from the White House and wanted to both prioritize and expedite the administration’s requests. 

4. Twitter Promises White House It Will Boost Censorship 

On March 1, 2021, after a meeting with White House officials about “misinformation,” Twitter sent a follow-up email promising that it would do more to suppress “misleading information.”

“Thanks again for meeting with us today. As we discussed, we are building on ‘our’ continued efforts to remove the most harmful COVID-19 ‘misleading information’ from the service,” Twitter wrote.

5. Facebook Fulfills White House’s Covid Censorship Requests   

Sometime between May and July, a “senior Meta executive” sent emails to White House officials, letting them know that Meta was fulfilling White House “requests” to censor alleged Covid-19 misinformation. The email also said Meta was “expand[ing] penalties” for “Facebook accounts that share misinformation.”

“We think there is considerably more we can do in ‘partnership’ with you and your team to drive behavior,” Meta wrote. 

6. Facebook Agrees to More Sweeping White House Covid Vaccine Censorship Demands

On March 21, 2021, Facebook sent an email to the White House recapping a March 19 in-person meeting during which the Biden administration apparently “demanded a consistent point of contact with Facebook, additional data from Facebook, ‘Levers for Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy Content,’ and censorship policies for Meta’s platform WhatsApp.” In response, according to Doughty, Facebook said it was “censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of” anti-vaccine content “that does not contain actionable misinformation.”

7. Facebook Shadowbans Vaccine Content on WhatsApp at Behest of White House

In the same aforementioned email, Facebook also agreed to shadowban anti-Covid vaccine content on Meta-owned WhatsApp. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that do not contain actionable misinformation,” the Big Tech company explained. 

8. Facebook Boosts White House’s Vaccine Propaganda 

On April 13, 2021, the White House asked Facebook multiple times to “amplify” pro-vaccine messaging in the wake of a “temporary halt” of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Re the J & J news, we’re keen to amplify any messaging you want us to project about what this means for people,” Facebook wrote back. 

9. White House Demands Censorship of Tucker Carlson Post 

On April 14, 2021, a White House official emailed a Facebook executive inquiring into why a Tucker Carlson post with an “anti-vax message” had not been censored. Facebook responded, stating that while the post did not violate community guidelines, it was being “demoted.” Another White House official, unsatisfied with the shadowbanning since Carlson’s post had garnered 40,000 shares, wrote an email demanding an explanation from Facebook. The official also apparently directly called a Facebook executive. Facebook subsequently assured the White House that the video was given a “50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”

10.  Twitter Deplatforms Alex Berenson After White House Calls Him ‘Epicenter of Disinfo’

On April 21, officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services met with Twitter for a “Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.” During the meeting, White House officials “wanted to know” why journalist Alex Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter, calling him “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” Berenson was later suspended and eventually deplatformed. 

11.  Facebook Appeases White House Censorship Demands to Get Back in Biden’s ‘Good Graces’

In July 2021, after intense public and internal pressure from White House officials, including Press Secretary Jen Psaki and President Joe Biden himself, Facebook waged a mass censorship campaign against the “Disinformation Dozen” and anyone connected to them. The “Disinformation Dozen” are 12 users (one of whom is RFK Jr.) who were apparently responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content. Around that same time, a Facebook official asked one of Biden’s senior advisers for ways to “get back into the White House’s good graces,” adding that Facebook and the White House were “100% on the same team here in fighting this.”

12. White House Successfully Pressures Twitter to Remove Jill Biden Parody Video

On Nov. 30, 2021, the White House emailed Twitter to flag an edited video of First Lady Jill Biden “profanely heckling children while reading to them,” according to the injunction. In response, Twitter slapped a label on the video, warning that it had been “edited for comedic effect.” However, that wasn’t enough for the White House. After several back and forths that included the first lady’s press secretary, Twitter removed the video in December 2021.

The above list is only the tip of the iceberg. The Biden administration’s colossal war on the First Amendment includes an even wider range of targets, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory, anyone who questions the integrity of the 2020 election, anyone who questions the security of voting by mail, anyone who questions climate change, pro-lifers, people who believe in the sex binary, negative posts about the economy, and general criticism of the president. “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Judge Doughty.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso 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.

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Judge: Psaki Pushed Social Media to Censor COVID Info


By Solange Reyner    |   Wednesday, 05 July 2023 02:54 PM EDT

Read more at https://www.newsmax.com/us/jen-psaki-white-house-censorship/2023/07/05/id/1126057/

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki pushed social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 information coming from conservative voices starting in May 2021, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, the Daily Caller reported. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted an injunction barring President Joe Biden’s administration from contacting tech companies to request the censorship of some users.

The ruling came in response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. Their lawsuit alleged the federal government overstepped in its efforts to convince social media companies to address postings that could result in vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or affect elections.

“If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the injunction read. “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government, and particularly the defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”

Doughty cited “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign. He wrote the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'”

The Justice Department is reviewing the injunction “and will evaluate its options in this case,” said a White House official, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people but make independent choices about the information they present.”

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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Lawsuit Shows Government’s Hands All Over The Election Integrity Partnership’s Censorship Campaign


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 03, 2023

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/us/atlanta-active-shooter-situation-leaves-multiple-people-injured-police-say

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While private platforms did the censoring, the complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship.

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The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with state, local, and federal government officials to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Louisiana federal court alleged.

Over the course of the 88-page complaint, the named plaintiffs, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, detailed extensive direct and indirect government involvement with the defendants’ censorship activities, allegedly making the private entities and individuals “state actors” for purposes of the Constitution. 

Here are the highlights of the government’s alleged connection to the defendants’ censorship activities.

A Bit About the Defendants

Formed in 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) describes itself as a partnership “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” In early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the effort the “Virality Project.”

In both the run-up to the 2020 election and since then, EIP and the Virality Project pushed Big Tech companies to censor speech. Excepting the University of Washington, which was not named in the class-action lawsuit, the institutions involved in the EIP and Virality Project are private entities, and the individuals running those institutions are non-governmental actors. Thus, without more, the censorship efforts would not implicate the First Amendment.

The Alleged Conspiracy

But there was more — much more — a conspiracy between the defendants, according to the complaint. Those defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct; Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Renée DiResta, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s research manager; the Atlantic Council; the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab. 

In support of the alleged conspiracy, the plaintiffs quoted at length the defendants’ own words, much of it culled from the EIP’s post-election report, but also pulled from interviews and its webpage. Here we see the EIP boast of its “coalition” that exchanged information with “election officials, government agencies,” and “social media platforms.” “The work carried out by the EIP and its partners during the 2020 U.S. election,” the defendants stressed, “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.” 

The united goal, according to the complaint, was censorship. This is clear from Stamos’ Aug. 26, 2020, comment to The New York Times, when the Stanford Observatory director explained that the EIP sought to collaborate with Big Tech to remove “disinformation.” The EIP further explained that it saw itself filling the “critical gap” of monitoring supposed election “misinformation” inside the United States — a gap the EIP recognized existed because the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech.

But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created “in consultation” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students. The CISA then assisted Stanford as it sought to “figure out what the gap was” the EIP needed to address. Two weeks before EIP officially launched, Stanford also met “with CISA to present EIP concept.” 

Government Collaboration with EIP

The government continued to work with EIP after its formation. Both federal and state-level government officials submitted “tickets” or reports of supposed misinformation to EIP, which would then submit them to the social media companies for censorship. EIP’s post-election report identified government partners who submitted tips of misinformation, including CISA, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the last of which received reports of disinformation from state and local government officials. EIP would then forward the complaints to the social media companies for censorship. 

CISA also helped EIP by connecting it with election-official groups, such as the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, both of which represent state and local government officials. CISA facilitated meetings between EIP and those groups as well, leading to censorship requests fed to the EIP and then forwarded to social media companies.

The government’s entanglement with the censorship efforts of EIP was more pronounced when it came to the Center for Internet Security because CISA both funded the Center for Internet Security and directed state and local election officials to report supposed misinformation to it. CISA further connected the Center for Internet Security to EIP, resulting in the former feeding the latter a substantial number of misinformation tickets. EIP then pushed those censorship requests to social media companies.

Later, as the 2020 election neared, CISA coordinated with the Center for Internet Security and EIP “to establish a joint reporting process,” with the three organizations agreeing to “let each other know what they were reporting to platforms like Twitter.” 

Overlapping Personnel

The individuals responsible for EIP, including Stamos, DiResta, and Kate Starbird, all “have or had formal roles in CISA.” Both Stamos and Starbird are members of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, while DiResta is a “Subject Matter Expert” for a CISA subcommittee. 

Additionally, two of the six CISA members who “took shifts” in reporting supposed misinformation to Big Tech companies apparently worked simultaneously as interns for CISA and at the Stanford Internet Observatory and EIP, reporting “misinformation” to the social media companies on behalf of both CISA and EIP. In fact, the two interns reported “misinformation” to platforms on behalf of CISA by using “EIP ticket numbers.” One of the CISA interns also forwarded a detailed report of supposed “misinformation” from the Election Integrity Partnership to social media companies using CISA’s reporting system. 

Coordination with Virality Project

As noted above, after the 2020 election, the Election Integrity Project replicated its censorship efforts to combat so-called Covid “misinformation” through the Virality Project. The Virality Project used the foundations established with the government’s assistance for the EIP and continued to collaborate with government officials and Big Tech.

The Virality Project boasted of its “strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.” The Virality Project also identified “federal health agencies” and “state and local public health officials” as “stakeholders” who “provided tips, feedback and requests to assess specific incidents and narratives.” And as was the case with the Election Integrity Project, the Virality Project flagged content for censorship by social media companies, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, through a ticket system.

While it was those private platforms that censored Hoft, Hines, and an untold number of other Americans, the class-action complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship, while hiding behind EIP and other organizations. And because EIP allegedly conspired with the government to silence the plaintiffs’ speech, the class-action lawsuit seeks to hold it liable too. 

The defendants have some time before responding. When they do, they’ll likely seek to have the lawsuit tossed, arguing they aren’t the government and thus could not violate the First Amendment. The detailed allegations of collaboration with the government make it unlikely they will succeed on a motion to dismiss, however, which will mean the plaintiffs will be entitled to discovery — and that’s where we’ll likely see the real evidence of a conspiracy. 

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.

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Biden: ‘Free Press Is A Pillar Of Free Society,’ Unless Your Name Is Tucker Carlson


BY: JORDAN BOYD | MAY 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/01/biden-free-press-is-a-pillar-of-free-society-unless-your-name-is-tucker-carlson/

President Joe Biden speaks at 2023 White House Correspondent Dinner
Biden’s ‘joke’ about Tucker Carlson may have been hilarious to people who hate the pundit, but it didn’t land with the American people.

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Less than one week after Fox News abruptly ousted its most popular host, Tucker Carlson, President Joe Biden joined in the chorus of corporate media, Democrats, and celebrities praising the exit as a victory for the left.

Biden began his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night with a tribute to the press and the First Amendment that keeps them in business.

“The free press is a pillar — maybe the pillar — of a free society, not the enemy,” he said in his opening comments.

Minutes later, after he quoted Thomas Jefferson’s letter about preferring “newspapers without government” over a “government without newspapers,” the Democrat took a moment to toot his own horn and relish in Tucker Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox News at the same time.

‘Well, the truth is we really have a record to be proud of,” Biden started. “Vaccinated the nation. Transformed the economy. Earned historic legislative victories and midterm results. But the job isn’t finished. I mean — it is finished for Tucker Carlson.”

Biden’s jab was met with an “oooh” and laughter from the crowd.

“What are you wooing about like that?” Biden said between laughs. “Like you think that’s not reasonable? Give me a break. Just give me a break.”

It’s hauntingly ironic that the president and his allies in the corporate media spent their weekend laughing at the dismissal of one of their top political enemies while regular Americans mourn the loss of the nation’s most influential critic of the corrupt ruling class.

Ever since the Murdochs decided to yank “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from the air, disenfranchised viewers committed to divorcing the network in droves.

[RELATED: I Taped A Show With Tucker On Censorship Right Before He Was Fired]

At the end of the day, however, neither Biden nor the corporate media care that the man whose show consistently ranked as the highest-rated cable news programming, including among young Democrat viewers, is no longer on screens all over the nation.

It’s been clear for years now that the same First Amendment rights the media’s preferred candidates like Biden pretend to affirm are not afforded to commentators like Carlson or anyone else who questions The Narrative™.

Carlson admitted this during his last public address before news of his departure broke.

“No, we have a First Amendment. That can’t happen here, but it has,” Carlson said at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala celebration.

It is easy for Biden to sing the praises of the press when all he gets from them are fawning, optimistic attention, and cover that caters to his every request. For those like Carlson who expose the cozy relationship between Democrats and media, only condemnation awaits.

Because Carlson reports on issues that the president’s allies refuse to — like Biden family corruption, election maladministration, and Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial — the Biden White House has repeatedly sought to discredit the host and his former employer.

Biden pretends, like at the Correspondents’ Dinner, that the journos who gladly help Biden use cheat sheets at his few and far between press conferences are not “the enemy” of society and democracy — though Americans overwhelmingly know better. At the same time, he gloats that one of his personal enemies, a member of the press, could potentially stay off of cable news for good.

Biden’s “joke” about the former Fox News host may have been hilarious to a room full of people who rooted for the death of Carlson’s career for years, but it didn’t land with the American people. If anything, Biden’s Carlson crack further confirms that the regime only plans to recognize the constitutional rights of its allies.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Judge Duncan’s Struggle Session Shows Why We Need Fiercer Protection of Free Speech


BY: SAMUEL MANGOLD-LENETT | MARCH 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/27/judge-duncans-struggle-session-shows-why-we-need-fiercer-protection-of-free-speech/

Judge Kyle Duncan
The Stanford disruptors’ objective was to destroy American civil society and replace it with leftist authoritarianism, preventing dissent.

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The culture of free speech that for so long characterized American academia is dead. Increasingly, struggle sessions and violent eruptions are how the nation’s best and brightest choose to handle the ideas, individuals, and situations that make them uncomfortable.

Earlier this month, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan was invited by the Stanford Federalist Society to their law school to give a talk titled “Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” What ensued is what has become the norm. A coalition of the dysgenic and well-dressed filled a lecture hall to shout down and demean a federal judge while a school diversity administrator chastised him with prepared remarks.

Disagreement is OK and clearly would have been welcomed by Duncan, but when students feel emboldened to tell a federal judge, “We hope your daughters get raped,” as one individual allegedly did, a course correction is desperately needed.

On Friday, Duncan addressed this very topic in a talk titled “Free Speech and Legal Education In Our Liberal Democracy” at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government. 

“This is a talk about another talk,” Duncan quipped to inform those in the audience who were unaware that he would be, in part, discussing the incident at Stanford.

In a general defense of student protests, Duncan stated, “It’s a great country where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. … The students at Stanford and other elite law schools swim in an ocean of free speech. … Has any group of people ever been so privileged?” 

Continuing, the judge referenced a memo published on March 22 by the dean of Stanford Law, Jenny Martinez, in which she condemned the disruptions and “threatening messages directed at members of [the Stanford Law] community” and pledged to adopt stricter policies regarding event disruption.

Martinez’s memo specifically contrasts student protests with malicious disruptions, noting that universities, as institutions, have unique obligations to curtail the latter in the pursuit of academic freedom through the enforcement of conduct codes and administrative policies. And as Duncan noted, a rigid commitment to the cause of academic freedom is absolutely vital to both the preservation of the university system and American society. 

The universities that, at one point in time, were renowned for their unyielding commitment to free speech and the relentless pursuit of excellence in all things, to this day — despite the diminishing quality of graduates — still churn out leaders in every single sector.

Noting the undeniable trend of woke radicalization among young people in elite universities and the threat it poses to the maintenance of civil order and liberal democracy, Duncan asked, “What would happen if the cast of mind in that Stanford classroom becomes the norm in legislatures, in courts, in universities, in boardrooms, in business, in churches?”

“We must resist this at all costs,” Duncan continued. “Otherwise, we will cease to have [the] rule of law.”

Toward the end of her memo, Martinez also ruled out disciplining the individuals who disrupted Duncan’s lecture at Stanford Law, as it would be onerous to discern which students “crossed the line into disruptive heckling while others engaged in constitutionally protected non-disruptive protest” and that university administrators sent “conflicting signals about whether what was happening was acceptable or not.”

Instead, the offending students — along with the rest of the law school’s student body — will be required to attend a “mandatory half-day session in spring quarter for all students on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.” 

In the final moments of his speech at Notre Dame, Duncan mentioned he was “cautiously encouraged” by this measure as it indicated Stanford Law’s leadership was in some form committed to fighting for the foundational principles of American academia. He also noted that the point of the struggle session wasn’t purely to intimidate or dissuade him. After all, he’s a federal judge — he has life tenure; his future is secure. 

The point of heckling Duncan, denying him a chance to make his case, and even wishing rape upon his children was to make an example out of him and to intimidate the students who invited him to speak. The disruptors want to destroy what is left of American civil society and replace it with an even more omnipresent woke authoritarianism, further preventing the dissemination of dissent. In order to accomplish this, they need future generations of leaders — their classmates — to be afraid, so they jeer and they threaten. 

This ethos, one that is undeniably a well-established, if not the dominant, worldview on American campuses, cannot be remedied through scolding. Half-day sessions “on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession” might knock some sense into a couple of dozen Stanford Law students, but what about every other campus in the U.S.? 

Days after the incident at Stanford Law, militant Antifa groups descended upon the University of California, Davis, in an attempt to prevent Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, from speaking on campus. Prior to the event, Gary May, the chancellor of UC Davis, circulated a video claiming Kirk “advocated for violence against transgender individuals.” Ultimately, the militants were unsuccessful in their attempts, but unlike at Stanford, the disruptors attempted violence and destroyed public property in the pursuit of denying an individual’s right to free speech.

How much longer can we continue to delude ourselves about free speech? There are, to be sure, legal protections for speech, but the leftists who control the institutions where these protections are most needed (academia, Big Tech, et al.)  actively eschew and chip away at them in collaboration with the federal government.

A more muscular approach to protect the speech of Americans is needed. 

In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring American universities “to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate [ ] through compliance with the First Amendment” in order to access specific federal funds. 

But even this, as we can see, didn’t — rather, it couldn’t — address the underlying ideological issues at play. 

Sure, threatening to cut off federal grants might encourage university administrators to be more vigilant in their defense of (or less hostile in their attacks on) free speech. But, at the end of the day, the left controls these institutions and interprets “free speech” in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the American founding and the First Amendment; speech must be contained within their preferred paradigm, or else it and anything descending from it is an affront to their very existence and must be eradicated.

Back at Stanford Law, Tirien Steinbach, the diversity administrator who chastised Duncan, has been put on leave, and per Martinez’s memo, an explicit role of other Stanford Law administrators moving forward “will be to ensure that university rules on disruption of events will be followed, and all staff will receive additional training in that regard.”

So perhaps Duncan is right to be somewhat optimistic.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @Mangold_Lenett.

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Time Is Running Out to Speak Freely About Free Speech in America


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/20/time-is-running-out-to-speak-freely-about-free-speech-in-america/

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Americans need to have an important discussion about free speech now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so. 

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The Censorship Complex — whereby Big Tech censorship is induced by the government, media, and media-rating businesses — threatens the future of free speech in this country. To understand how and why, Americans need to talk about speech — and the government’s motive to deceive the public. 

To frame this discussion, consider these hypotheticals:

  • Two American soldiers training Ukraine soldiers in Poland cross into the war zone, ambushing and killing five Russian soldiers. Unbeknownst to the American soldiers, a Ukrainian soldier filmed the incident and provides the footage to an independent journalist who authors an article on Substack, providing a link to the video. 
  • Russia uses its intelligence service and “bots” to flood social media with claims that the Ukrainians are misusing 90 percent of American tax dollars. In truth, “only” 40 percent of American tax dollars are being wasted or corruptly usurped — a fact that an independent journalist learns when a government source leaks a Department of Defense report detailing the misappropriation of the funds sent to Ukraine.
  • A third of Americans disagree with the continued funding of the war in Ukraine and organically prompt #NoMoreMoola to trend. After this organic hashtag trend begins, Russian operatives amplify the hashtag while the Russian-run state media outlet, Russia Today, reports on the hashtag trend. 
  • Following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the communist Chinese government uses social media to create the false narrative that 10 specifically named financial institutions are bordering on collapsing. In reality, only Bank A1 is financially troubled, but a bank run on any of the 10 banks would cause those banks to collapse too.

In each of these scenarios — and countless others — the government has an incentive to deceive the country. Americans need to recognize this reality to understand the danger posed by the voluntary censorship of speech.

Our government will always seek to quash certain true stories and seed certain false stories: sometimes to protect human life, sometimes to protect our national defense or the economy or public health, sometimes to obtain the upper hand against a foreign adversary, and sometimes to protect the self-interests of its leaders, preferred policy perspectives, and political and personal friends.

Since the founding, America’s free press provided a check on a government seeking to bury the truth, peddle a lie, or promote its leaders’ self-interest. At times, the legacy press may have buried a story or delayed its reporting to protect national security interests, but historically those examples were few and far between. 

Even after the left-leaning slant of legacy media outlets took hold and “journalists” became more open to burying (or spinning) stories to protect their favored politicians or policies, new media provided a stronger check and a way for Americans to learn the truth. The rise of social media, citizen journalists, Substack, and blogs added further roadblocks to both government abuse and biased and false reporting. 

Donald Trump’s rise, his successful use of social media, and new media’s refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government’s definition of “truth” and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual Americans — even experts. 

The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance. 

We know this because notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation, Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin. 

But if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth. 

Consider again the above hypotheticals. In each of those scenarios, the government — or at least some in the government — has an incentive to bury the truth. In each, it could frame the truth as a foreign disinformation campaign and offer Americans a countervailing lie as the truth. 

A populace voluntarily acquiescing in the censorship of speech because it is purportedly foreign misinformation or disinformation will soon face a government that lies, protected by complicit media outlets that repeat those lies as truth, social media websites that ban or censor reporting that challenges the official government narrative, hosting services that deplatform dissenting media outlets, advertisers that starve journalists of compensation, and search engines that hide the results of disfavored viewpoints.

The window is quickly closing on free speech in America, so before it is locked and the curtain thrown shut, we must talk about speech. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, in which the government should alert reporters and media outlets to supposed foreign disinformation and how. We need to discuss the circumstances, if any, under which Big Tech should censor speech.

Americans need to have this discussion now — before the Censorship Complex makes it impossible to do so. 

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.

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How House Weaponization Committee Republicans Can Get The Most From Their ‘Twitter Files’ Witnesses


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 08, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/08/how-the-house-weaponization-committee-can-get-the-most-from-its-twitter-files-witnesses/

Jim Jordan in committee hearing
Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.

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Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”

Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence. 

Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans

Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”

Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.

Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear. 

Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.

If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.” 

Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)

Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story

Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months. 

Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.

Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start

Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.

Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.

Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?

Buckets of Scandals

The story will quickly progress from there, but how? 

While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.

Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.

Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox

Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more. 

What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why? 

Twitter-Government Coordination

The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.” 

Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech. 

Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success. 

The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.

Non-Governmental Organizations

Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University. 

What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have? 

Disinformation About Disinformation 

The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable. 

Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public. 

Funding Sources

Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.

Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?

Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots

After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.” 

Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.

Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved? 

What Was the Media’s Role?

Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.

Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?

Specific Instances of Censorship 

Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing. 

While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.

However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.

The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?” 

The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth? 

Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic? 

That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.

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.

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    Whistleblower: FBI Targeted Innocent Rally-Goers Just for Being in D.C. On Jan. 6 


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 07, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/07/whistleblower-fbi-targeted-innocent-rally-goers-just-for-being-in-d-c-on-jan-6/

    man in D.C. on Jan. 6 holding a voter fraud sign and wearing a red maga hat
    The FBI’s D.C. field office treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, with no evidence to do so. 

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    The FBI’s D.C. field office directed the Boston office to open investigations into more than 100 Americans who had attended the Jan. 6 rally despite having no evidence those individuals had committed any crime, according to whistleblower testimony reviewed by The Federalist. This represents the second attempt by the D.C. field office to sic the FBI on innocent Americans — in this case, people who were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

    The D.C. field office pressured Boston’s FBI office to open criminal investigations into some 140 people who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to testimony from George Hill, a whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, reviewed by The Federalist. The D.C. field office applied this pressure, Hill said, even though it had no evidence that any of those travelers had entered restricted areas of the Capitol.

    Hill, a military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst, had previously identified himself as one of several whistleblowers cooperating with House Judiciary Committee investigators when he spoke with Just the News’ John Solomon last month. The Federalist’s review of Hill’s testimony confirmed the details he told Solomon and exposed more troubling information.

    According to Hill’s testimony, after rioters entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the D.C. field office, which was leading the investigation, presented the Boston office “definitive evidence” that two individuals within its jurisdiction had entered restricted areas of the Capitol. Boston opened investigations into those two individuals. 

    In his deposition testimony to congressional investigators, Hill explained that because those two people had arranged for buses to take rally-goers to Washington, the D.C. field office told the Boston office to open investigations into all 140 of the passengers. 

    According to the whistleblower, a Boston supervisory special agent, or SSA, told the D.C. field office, “Happy to do it. Show us where they were inside the Capitol, and we’ll look into it.” 

    But the D.C. field office said it couldn’t do that unless it knew the exact time and location in the Capitol where the individuals were located, according to Hill’s testimony. Then when Boston asked for access to the 11,000 hours of video to allow its own agents to review the footage themselves to assess whether to launch an investigation into any of the rally-goers, the D.C. field office refused to share the video, Hill’s testimony revealed. The bureau claimed the footage might reveal undercover agents or confidential human sources, according to the whistleblower.

    Yet the D.C. field office persisted in its demand for Boston to open investigations into everyone on the bus, threatening to call the special agent in charge of the field office if the lower-level agent refused. The supervisory special agent remained firm, however. As Hill explained, the SSA told the D.C. field office that those 140 people “were going to a political rally, which is First Amendment protected activity.” 

    This move by the bureau represents its second such attempt — just from Hill’s testimony — to target innocent Americans. As The Federalist reported on Monday, Hill also told the House Judiciary Committee that the D.C. field office pressured local FBI field offices to open investigations on innocent, gun-owning Americans based on data mining that Bank of America voluntarily provided to the bureau. 

    According to The Federalist’s review of the testimony, Hill said the Bank of America list included people who used its credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Furthermore, people who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm were elevated to the top of the list. 

    In both instances, Boston’s special agent in charge, Joseph Bonavolonta, withstood the outside pressure — something Hill commended in his testimony.

    While Bonavolonta and the Boston office refused to investigate Americans based solely on their First Amendment activities or credit card receipts placing them in the greater-D.C. area, it is unclear whether other field offices launched investigations based on the D.C. office’s pressure. A source familiar with Hill’s testimony confirmed that Hill did not know the answer to that question either. 

    Open-source reporting, however, reveals that in at least one instance, the FBI questioned an individual who organized buses for rally-goers — apparently without any evidence of potentially illegal conduct. In January of 2021, FBI agents appeared at Jim Worthington’s suburban Philadelphia home to quiz him about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Worthington was not home at the time but later spoke with investigators over the course of two hours, confirming he had been in D.C. for the rally and had “helped bring busloads of people to the event,” but had “never went to the Capitol.” 

    Given that Worthington, who also led the People4Trump PAC, never entered the Capitol, one must wonder what legitimate basis the FBI claimed it had to target him. 

    Or had the D.C. field office pressured the Philadelphia field office to open an investigation into Worthington? And what about the some-200 people who traveled to D.C. on the buses Worthington arranged? Did the local field office open investigations into those people? And what about the other 50-plus field offices? Did they also target individuals based on their First Amendment-protected activities? With stories of buses from across America traveling to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally, it is a definite possibility. 

    While it’s long been known that the House’s Jan. 6 Committee and the legacy media pushed a narrative that conflated the rally-goers and the rioters, the whistleblower’s allegations now suggest the FBI’s D.C. field office also treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, without any evidentiary basis to do so. 

    Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.

    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.

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    Tucker Carlson Calls Out ‘Professional Christians’ Who Don’t Speak Up For Religious Freedom


    By: HAROLD HUTCHISON, REPORTER | March 02, 20239:45 PM ET

    Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/tucker-carlson-calls-out-professional-christians-who-dont-speak-up-for-religious-freedom-2659494812.html/

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    Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out “professional Christians” Thursday, saying they did not speak up for religious freedom when “Christians are arrested for being Christians.”

    “You have to wonder when you see a tape like that where are so-called Christian leaders?” Carlson, a co-founder of the Daily Caller and honorary board member of the Daily Caller News Foundation, said after discussing the legal ordeal of Mark Houck, who was charged with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 2022 before being acquitted in January. “Where is Russell Moore and all the other breastfeeding Christians as that happens, as the U.S. government cracks down on Christianity and prayer? Silent.” 

    WATCH:

    Carlson noted that the Biden administration dropped charges against some rioters in Portland, while others were sentenced to community service in contrast to the prosecutions of Houck and Paul Vaughn, who was one of 11 pro-life activists arrested over a March 2021 protest at an abortion clinic. Video showed heavily armed FBI agents taking Vaughn into custody in October.

    Carlson also mocked Attorney General Merrick Garland over his explanation during a Wednesday hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee about why more pro-life protesters were arrested than alleged perpetrators of attacks on crisis pregnancy centers.

    Carlson then discussed the ordeal of Canadian pastor Derek Reimer, who was arrested by Calgary police Thursday on charges of “mischief” and “causing a disturbance,” after he was forcibly removed while protesting an “all ages” drag show, the Post-Millennial reported.

    “Where all the professional Christians? You have to wonder that again,” Carlson said. “Where’s David French and Beth Moore and Tim Keller and all these people who were defending Christianity when actual Christians are being arrested for being Christians? Not a word.”

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    Adam Schiff And a Band of Democrats Propose Overturning the First Amendment


    BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JANUARY 20, 2023

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/20/adam-schiff-and-his-merry-band-of-democrats-propose-overturning-the-first-amendment/

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    Happy Birthday, Citizens United!

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    Adam Schiff and a group of Democrats introduced a proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision, one of the greatest free-speech victories in history.

    It’s just a political stunt, of course, as Schiff doesn’t have the votes. But it does reflect the authoritarian outlook of the contemporary left on free expression. From the day the decision came down, 13 years ago this week, Citizens United was a rallying cry for those threatened by unregulated discourse. President Barack Obama infamously, and inaccurately, rebuked the justices during his State of the Union for upholding the First Amendment. Since then, Democrats have regularly blamed the decision for the alleged corrosion of “democracy.”

    Recall, however, that Citizens United decision revolved around the federal government’s banning of a documentary critical of 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before the Democratic primary elections. At the time, McCain-Feingold made it illegal for corporations (groups of freely associating citizens) and unions (ditto) to engage in “electioneering” a month before a primary or two months before a general election. It was outright censorship. In oral arguments, then-Solicitor General of the United States, now-Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan initially contended that the federal government had the right to censor books that “express advocacy.”

    Also recall that “campaign finance” laws — speech codes, in reality — were written by politicians and defended by a media encumbered by any limitations on their own free expression. These detestable laws prohibited groups of citizens from assembling and pooling their resources to engage more effectively in what is the most important kind of political expression at the most vital time, right before an election.

    Schiff’s amendment would overturn Citizens United, and thus the First Amendment, and empower state and federal governments to enact “reasonable, viewpoint-neutral” limitations on speech that “influences” elections.

    For one thing, even a wholly neutral restrictions on political speech were possible, they would still be restrictions on expression. It doesn’t matter one whit if you find those restrictions “reasonable” or “neutral.” The right of free speech isn’t contingent on fairness or outcomes or your good faith limitations. It is a free-standing, inherent right protected by the Constitution, not prescribed to us by the state in portions. It’s amazing that this has to be said.

    Moreover, do Democrats trust Kevin McCarthy’s conception of “reasonable”? Because I don’t. Nor do I trust Hakeem Jeffries or that weasel Schiff, who has already personally engaged in censoring dissent. As Lois Lerner could tell you, any law empowering bureaucrats to define political speech will be arbitrarily enforced and, inevitably, abused. The only “viewpoint-neutral” position on speech is that it’s none of the state’s business.

    Then again, not even the amendment is neutral. Section 4 of Schiff’s proposal offers an exemption to the “press.” Who is the press? Bureaucrats, no doubt, will make that determination. Schiff knows that most large communication companies already work for Democrats. The big studios produce movies and documentaries with one ideological viewpoint; and major news outlets give one side billions in in-kind contributions. The amendment would strip one group of its power to compete in the marketplace of ideas. “By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in Citizens United, “the Government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing, and respect for the speaker’s voice.”

    Schiff’s amendment could also be used to strip people of anonymity. “Dark money” has been a bogeyman of the left for years, treated as one of the most corrosive elements in contemporary politics — even though leftists are more reliant on anonymous big-dollar money than conservatives. Of course, the expectation that private citizens have any responsibility to publicly attach their names to political speech — as Publius might tell you — is destructive nonsense.

    “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority,” the 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission famously noted. It “exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation … at the hand of an intolerant society.” There are entire genres of mainstream “reporting” that exist to dox heretics and punish dissent and engage in struggle sessions. Leftists want to create as many Brendan Eichs as possible to chill speech.

    Schiff claims he wants to “return power to people” by allowing the state to prescribe the way they can participate in political debate. Schiff’s amendment includes restricting corporations from spending “unlimited amounts of money to influence elections.” Corporations have been banned from donating directly to candidates since 1907. But why shouldn’t private entities, groups of people, be allowed to “influence” politics? Anyway, you can already imagine the malleability of the word “influence.” Will California ban corporations from influencing green policy? Or only from influencing cultural policy? Boy, I wonder.

    A decade ago, politicians would give us some perfunctory words about the importance of free expression. Those days are gone. The bogus panic over “disinformation” — without free will, you guys are far too susceptible to bad ideas — has given them the excuse to wring their hands over the dangerous excesses of the First Amendment.

    These days a person can contribute as much money as they please to any independent group that shares their values. The notion that there should be restrictions stopping you from airing those views, whether you’re a billionaire or a poor student, is fundamentally un-American and authoritarian.

    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.

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    Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco


    A.F. Branco Cartoon – Breach

    A.F. BRANCO | on December 20, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-breach/

    Elon Musk exposed Twitter files reveal the FBI breached the 1st Amendment by pushing censorship on conservatives and interfering with the election.

    Twitter FBI Intelligence agentcy
    Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.

    DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

    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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    LGBTQ ‘rights’ and the First Amendment cannot co-exist


    By Ryan Bomberger, Exclusive Columnist | Thursday, December 15, 2022

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/lgbtq-rights-and-the-first-amendment-cannot-co-exist.html

    Unsplash/Sharon McCutcheon

    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.

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    We’re Slowly Killing The First Amendment


    BY: DAVID HARSANYI | DECEMBER 13, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/13/the-first-amendment-is-dying-2/

    George Orwell in Hampstead
    You can’t force people to be free.

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    I’ve been banging this drum a while now. Prognosis still negative.

    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.

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    Kirk Cameron Can’t Read His Children’s Book to Kids Unless He Dresses Like a Prostitute and Gyrates for Their Singles


    BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | DECEMBER 08, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/08/kirk-cameron-cant-read-his-childrens-book-to-kids-unless-he-dresses-like-a-prostitute-and-gyrates-for-their-singles/

    Kirk Cameron side by side with drag queen
    How does it go again? …Something, something ‘blessings of liberty’?

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    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.

    Buy Kirk Cameron’s book “As You Grow” here.

    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.

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    Liberal Supreme Court Justice Blocks Jan. 6 Committee


     By Jack Davis  October 27, 2022

    Read more at https://www.westernjournal.com/liberal-supreme-court-justice-blocks-jan-6-committee/

    Efforts by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion to examine phone records of the Arizona Republican Party chairwoman have been stymied by a member of the U.S. Supreme Court’s liberal wing.

    Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday temporarily blocked the panel from accessing the phone records of Dr. Kelli Ward and her husband, Mark Ward, according to The Hill.

    Kagan’s order was terse, saying, “Upon consideration of the application of counsel for the applicants, it is ordered that the October 22, 2022 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, case No. 22-16473, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.

    “Likewise, respondent T-Mobile USA, Inc. is temporarily enjoined from releasing the records requested by the House Select Committee pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court.

    “It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Friday, October 28, 2022, by 5 p.m. (EDT).”

    Kagan was involved because she is the justice assigned to handle emergency requests from Arizona.

    The Wards had sued to block access to their phone records. After losing their case at the district court level, they appealed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit voted 2-1 to deny their bid to protect their records, according to CNN.

    That prompted the emergency appeal to Kagan. “This is an unprecedented case with profound precedential implications for future congressional investigations and political associational rights under the First Amendment,” the Wards said in the appeal.

    “In a first-of-its-kind situation, a select committee of the United States Congress, dominated by one political party, has subpoenaed the personal telephone and text message records of a state chair of the rival political party relating to one of the most contentious political events in American history—the 2020 election and the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.”

    The appeal painted the case as potentially setting a dire precedent.

    “If Dr. Ward’s telephone and text message records are disclosed, congressional investigators are going to contact every person who communicated with her during and immediately after the tumult of the 2020 election. That is not speculation, it is a certainty. There is no other reason for the Committee to seek this information,” the Wards’ filing said.

    “There can be no greater chill on public participation in partisan politics than a call, visit, or subpoena, from federal investigators,” they wrote.

    The appellate panel ruled against the Wards, saying the federal subpoena “is substantially related to the important government interest in investigating the causes of the January 6 attack and protecting future elections from similar threats.”

    “The investigation, after all, is not about Ward’s politics; it is about her involvement in the events leading up to the January 6 attack, and it seeks to uncover those with whom she communicated in connection with those events,” Judges Barry Silverman and Eric Miller wrote in the majority opinion. “That some of the people with whom Ward communicated may be members of a political party does not establish that the subpoena is likely to reveal ‘sensitive information about [the party’s] members and supporters.’”

    The two judges who formed the majority castigated the activities of the Wards, who were electors pledged to former President Donald Trump.

    “Ward participated in a scheme to send spurious electoral votes to Congress, a scheme that the committee describes as ‘a key part’ of the ‘effort to overturn the election’ that culminated on Jan. 6,” the opinion said.

    In her dissent, Judge Sandra Ikuta said the Wards have valid constitutional rights that were insufficiently considered.

    “The communications at issue here between members of a political party about an election implicate a core associational right protected by the First Amendment,” Ikuta wrote.

    “Regardless of Ward’s position regarding the 2020 election, her right to engage in discussions with her political associates remains entitled to First Amendment protection against the government’s compelled disclosure of her political affiliations,” the judge said. “We must be vigilant to protect First Amendment rights — even when raised by an individual alleged to have engaged in a nefarious ‘scheme.’”

    Jack Davis

    Contributor

    Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.

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    EXCLUSIVE: Jan. 6 Committee Is Using Innocent Americans’ Assertion of Their Constitutional Rights as Proof of Guilt


    BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 12, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/12/exclusive-jan-6-committee-is-using-innocent-americans-assertion-of-their-constitutional-rights-as-proof-of-guilt/

    Jan. 6 committee segment with Jamie Raskin on MSNBC

    Implying guilt based on a witness asserting his rights ‘is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress.’

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    The Jan. 6 Committee is abusing its power by asking inappropriate questions about their fellow Americans’ beliefs and associates, and publicly portraying witnesses who exercise their Fifth Amendment rights as guilty — all to put on a show trial.

    Later on, Tuesday, the Jan. 6 Committee will hold yet another public hearing, this one purportedly to focus “on the role of extremists” in the attack on the Capitol. While the precise script for the afternoon’s proceedings remains unknown, last week Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin previewed the committee’s plans, telling The New York Times that when public hearings resumed in July, “he intends to lead a presentation that will focus on the roles far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and 1st Amendment Praetorian played in the Capitol attack.” According to the Times, “Mr. Raskin has also promised to explore the connections between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.”

    Recycling the Fifth Amendment Tactic

    An attorney for 1st Amendment Praetorian, or 1AP, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech, spoke exclusively with The Federalist about the committee’s questioning of 1AP, the group’s founder, and another member of the nonprofit, all of whom she represents. From the framing of the questions posed to her clients, Leslie McAdoo Gordon was left with the firm impression that the Jan. 6 Committee merely wanted video capturing her clients declining to answer the questions for the purpose of impugning their character during the televised hearings.

    “The committee knew before the depositions that my clients would be asserting their First and Fifth Amendment rights, and also would not answer any questions because the depositions were being held in violation of the rules established by the House,” McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist. So, shortly after the hearing began and the 1AP witnesses made clear they would not answer any questions, the staffers moved to general topic areas and would ask a few prepared questions, then the committee representative would note that he had more questions on the topic and inquire whether if he asked those questions, the witnesses intended to assert the same objections.

    “My clients would respond ‘yes’ to that question, so then the committee would move forward with the next topic,” McAdoo Gordon said. “But after covering various topics, the committee staffer at the end volleyed a litany of individual questions to my clients, forcing them to respond to each question with ‘Rules, First, and Fifth,’ the shorthand we had agreed to with the committee to convey their objections to questions posed.”

    Given that the committee had broadcast video of Michael Flynn asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in an earlier hearing, McAdoo Gordon said she wouldn’t be surprised if Tuesday’s hearings include clips of her clients refusing to answer the committee’s questions.

    In fact, she said as much to the committee in a letter last week. After calling the lawmakers out for implying to the public that Flynn was guilty of some crime because he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, McAdoo Gordon wrote that implying guilt based on a witness asserting his rights, “is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress.” The attorney added that she is “forced to anticipate that the Committee will use the same totalitarian tactic to improperly smear 1AP.”

    The irony is that McAdoo Gordon was working with the committee to arrange for her clients to testify voluntarily, within the bounds of the First Amendment, until the committee concocted what she has called a “cockamamie” criminal conspiracy theory. The committee argued in litigation with former Trump attorney John Eastman “that President Trump, Dr. Eastman, and others conspired to defraud the United States by disrupting the electoral count,” supposedly in violation of Section 371 of the federal criminal code, which makes it a crime to “conspire to defraud” the United States. The committee’s pushing of what she called a “preposterous” legal theory left McAdoo Gordon “with no option but to recommend that my clients assert their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.”

    McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist that during her clients’ depositions, the committee asked a series of questions that she likely would have allowed her clients to answer if the meeting had been on a voluntary basis. Putting aside the question of whether the committee was properly constituted, the 1AP’s attorney noted Congress had a legitimate interest in investigating the riots and violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    “What 1AP did, or more accurately put, didn’t do, on Jan. 6 was relevant to the committee’s investigation into the riot and the violence at the Capitol, and I was working to arrange for my clients to voluntarily provide the committee with that information,” McAdoo Gordon said. Likewise, the committee had questions about a couple tweets my clients sent on the sixth, and again, such questions were relevant to the Jan. 6 investigation. “

    “But once the committee advanced the absurd Section 371 criminal conspiracy theory, I could no longer recommend my clients speak with the committee,” the attorney explained. McAdoo Gordon did respond to the committee on behalf of her clients, however, after Raskin “falsely described 1AP as a ‘far right’ group with a ‘role’ in the ‘Capitol attack’” in his interview with the Times. “All of those points are false and defamatory,” she told the committee. “1AP is a mainstream, non-partisan group with no role whatsoever in the attack on the Capitol.”

    Violating the First Amendment

    It isn’t just the Fifth Amendment the committee has been shredding, however. “Even if my clients did not assert the Fifth Amendment, I would have still objected to several questions on First Amendment grounds,” McAdoo Gordon added. While some questions related to Jan. 6 were relevant, the majority of the questions posed to 1AP representatives were none of Congress’s business, McAdoo Gordon stressed. And even the process reveals the warped authoritarianism of the committee, the attorney added.

    “At the beginning of the depositions, the congressional staff sought confirmation that we were not recording the proceedings in any way, while they proceeded to video record the questioning,” McAdoo Gordon said. She then noted that while witnesses called before a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., can obtain a transcript of their testimony, the Jan. 6 Committee refuses to allow those they target to obtain transcripts of their subpoenaed testimony.

    The committee’s hiding of the transcripts serves to cover their lies and to control the narrative of the show trial, but it also allows the Jan. 6 Committee to hide the wildly inappropriate questions it posed to the witnesses.

    “Do you believe in QAnon?” “Do you believe that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States?” “What’s your understanding of what happened on 1/6?”

    “A Committee of the United States Congress actually asked my clients those questions,” McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist in an exclusive weekend interview.

    “Before the deposition, I assured my clients that their political and personal beliefs would not be probed,” the D.C. attorney explained. “While I knew from the subpoenas the Jan. 6 Committee intended to seek constitutionally protected information concerning other 1AP members, my jaw just kept dropping further when they started to question my clients on what they thought and believed.”

    The committee also asked Robert Lewis, who is a retired United States Army Green Beret and recipient of the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and Philip Luelsdorff, a former U.S. Army Ranger, to describe 1AP activities. For whom and for what purpose did they provide volunteer services? Did they provide security? Surveillance? Assistance with legal activities? What training did they provide? And how were they able to afford to provide the training and volunteer services? Where did the money come from? Who made donations? What bank accounts were used? Did the organization accept cryptocurrency?

    Again, none of those questions concerned the events of Jan. 6. Rather, the committee focused on events long before the Jan. 6 events at the Capitol. For instance, it asked whether 1AP provided security for polling places. Other questions concerned 1AP’s security work at a Nov. 14 rally and a Dec. 12 rally.

    In essence, the committee is seeking information about 1AP’s members, financial status, donors, and activities. None of that is relevant to the Jan. 6 riots, and all of it is off-limits to the government, the lawyer said. “The Committee had no business asking those questions, so my clients weren’t about to answer them in violation of their First Amendment rights.”

    “The Committee had cited as ‘evidence’ against my clients that they obtained a permit for a demonstration the day before the riot. How is obtaining a permit to hold a peaceful protest evidence of a role in a riot the next day? It isn’t,” McAdoo Gordon said. The committee also sought to quiz Lewis and Luelsdorff on their relationship with the Trump family, the White House, the campaign, and numerous specific individuals such as Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn. The staff further asked whether they had been in contact with any of the defense attorneys representing any of the Jan. 6 defendants.

    “The government should not be asking a civic organization, which is what 1AP is, about its relationships, in general, with other people, much less about the organization’s donors or lawyers with whom they spoke,” McAdoo Gordon stressed.

    Assuming Guilt with Dishonest Framing

    Beyond asking inappropriate questions that implicated 1AP’s First Amendment rights, the committee framed several questions in the “do you still beat your wife” format. Before the election, did they provide security “in order to overturn the election”? “Have you engaged in any activities to overturn the certified election results?” “Have you engaged in any activities to reinstall Donald Trump as president of the United States since Jan. 20, 2021?” These questions all presuppose that the “election results” were sought to be “overturned,” as opposed to challenged.

    But of course, the Jan. 6 Committee’s focus on the few unfounded claims of election fraud, as opposed to the numerous violations of state election law and evidence of illegal voting — issues Trump and his legal team pursued — aids in the narrative that the protesters wanted to “install” Trump or overturn the election, as opposed to protest election irregularities. And by using a guilt-by-association strategy, the committee paints not just 1AP and its volunteers as complicit in the violence at the Capitol, but every American who attended the rallies and peacefully protested the disastrous 2020 election.

    “The committee might be using nicer language, but its questioning is Stalinist in nature nonetheless,” McAdoo Gordon said.

    The 1AP lawyer is correct. But because the corrupt media is effectively serving as a state-run press for its preferred politicians, most of America will be oblivious to that fact when the hearings resume later today.

    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.

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    Barr: Public Schools Are Now So Hostile to Christians, They’re Unconstitutional


    A MUST READ AND SHARE -Jerry Broussard

    REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | JUNE 27, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/27/barr-public-schools-are-now-so-hostile-to-christians-theyre-unconstitutional/

    William Barr

    Religious devotion, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an ‘atheocracy.’

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    The West is facing its deepest civilizational crisis since Jesus Christ resurrected, and addressing the crisis requires removing militant secularists’ monopoly on education, former U.S. attorney general William Barr told a packed Christian conference in Chicago, Ill. on Saturday.

    “We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”

    In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.

    That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So, in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint. Such self-restraint is primarily developed through religious devotion, he said. But religious observance, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an “atheocracy,” his amalgam of the words “atheist theocracy.” These anti-religious forces now control the minds of American kids due to their monopoly on U.S. education institutions.

    “The threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,” Barr said. Barr also spoke to The Federalist about the asymmetric justice being carried out under Joe Biden by the agency he has led twice, the U.S. Department of Justice.

    In a 2021 interview with the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Barr said anti-religion leftists have effectively turned public schools into “secular-progressive madrassas.” In his Chicago speech on Saturday, the nation’s former top lawyer told the audience this state of affairs is likely a violation of the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of one religion over others, as well as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause that forbids the government from interfering with Americans’ religious obligations.

    “What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion,” Barr said.

    Barr told the sold-out Chicago audience at the 2022 conference of the Christian radio show “Issues, Etc.” that American politics now aligns with religious beliefs. The dichotomy in American life is no longer about prudential issues but religious ones: whether one acknowledges an objective, external, unchanging reality ordered by a transcendent deity or whether one insists the material world is all there is, which makes one’s god the self.

    This anti-God materialism now maps onto and fuels political leftism, Barr said:

    When a purely materialist worldview takes hold in society, it’s drawn to a messianic utopianism. Its adherents become enthralled with the idea that the meaning of life, what gives them purpose and meaning, is to be found in the quest for a perfect earthly society. The manipulation of the material world to achieve some form of nirvana here on earth. And the means used is achieving political power.

    The main obstacle to this earthly paradise is the existing structure, conventions and superstitions like religion. Any obstacle to our earthly paradise has to be torn down.

    These ideas are represented by the progressive movement in the United States. It basically is an ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives. It also explains the bitterness in our politics today. Because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.

    …Another part of this revolutionary era and the consequences we have been witnessing over the last couple of hundred years is a worldview that boils questions of morality solely down to an individual’s internal feelings. And their interior sense of pleasure and satisfaction. That’s how we gauge acts, whether people feel internally satisfied. And anything that advances that feeling is good, and anything that constrains or restricts that feeling is bad. This is a fundamental change in the worldview of the West.

    Because the U.S. Supreme Court and other American political institutions have turned public schools from essentially Christian schools into essentially anti-Christian schools, Barr said, the U.S. school system has been erasing the faith required to sustain limited government. Multiple studies provide evidence this is true.

    Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.

    “Personal and civic moral systems don’t just sort of hover in the air,” Barr explained. “They have to rest on an explanatory foundation, a metaphysical foundation. When people tell you to do something, you ask ‘Why?’ Why is it necessary to be good and what is it that consists of being good? So, the extent to which an education seeks to contribute to a student’s moral formation, it necessarily invades the space of religion when explaining what the moral values are and how they should be inherited.”

    Thanks to the current Supreme Court’s adherence to the original Constitution as written, Barr said he thinks this is an opportune moment for both court and legislative work to address this existential national crisis.

    “Public education was established as a melting pot that would establish a common American identity. How are the public schools doing on that front?” Barr asked, at which the audience burst into laughter. He continued: “The curriculum is now attacking the fundamental legitimacy of our form of government and our founding documents. That’s no way to bring us together as a nation.”

    The most direct way to resolve this constitutional and existential crisis in American education is to end the government monopoly over the provision of education, Barr said, with full school choice. (The form of school choice that offers the fewest opportunities for hostile bureaucrats to interfere with parent choices, by the way, is education savings accounts.)

    “The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr said. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral anymore.”

    Because anti-religious public schools hold a monopoly on public education funds, Barr noted, parents are forced to fight mostly ineffectively over what public schools teach, such as transgender ideology to kindergarteners and anti-white racism. Allowing parents to take their children’s public education dollars to institutions that match their beliefs will end such culture wars, he said, as well as help families more effectively pass their republic-sustaining faith on to their children.

    This alone can’t solve the entire existential crisis of the West, Barr conceded: “It’s not a panacea, but I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system.”

    Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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    The Only Way to Fight Disinformation Is to Fight Political Censorship


    REPORTED BY: STELLA MORABITO | APRIL 18, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/18/the-only-way-to-fight-disinformation-is-to-fight-political-censorship/

    Chicago Disinformation Conference

    The surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

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    If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.

    The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

    Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.

    So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.

    Unchecked Censorship Isolates People

    Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.

    As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”

    The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.

    If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=_YwzJe5Z8v0%3Ffeature%3Doembed

    Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real

    One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.

    Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.

    The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.

    Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”

    Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.

    Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians

    By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.

    The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.

    No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.

    Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.

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    Stop Arguing for Religious Liberty and Start Arguing Against Religious Discrimination


    COMMENTARY BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | MARCH 28, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/28/stop-arguing-for-religious-liberty-and-start-arguing-against-religious-discrimination/

    catholic charities

    For an increasingly secular populace, actions and policies must be defended on the basis of reason much more than faith.

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    In a recent legal settlement, Catholic Charities West Michigan successfully challenged Michigan’s decision to bar state funds to adoption agencies that do not serve same-sex couples. The settlement forced Michigan to reimburse the charity for its legal fees and other costs. Using an argument that has now become familiar to most Americans, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a lesbian mother of two and former gay rights activist, charged Catholic adoption agencies with discriminating against same-sex couples. In response, the Catholic adoption agencies used the same logic, accusing the Michigan state government of discriminating against Catholics and effectively denying them their religious freedom.

    While Christians should celebrate this recent victory, it’s nonetheless sad this appeal had to be made. When gay marriage was legalized in Obergfell v. Hodges, Christians were assured that they could practice their faith and live out their values in peace, but this was almost immediately proven wrong. As the ink of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was drying, LGBT groups immediately went after Christian bakers, florists, photographers, popular chicken sandwich chains, and other Christian organizations for their religious beliefs.

    Defense Based on Reason not Faith

    This war will continue so long as Christians keep using the religious freedom defense. Even though this argument has the best chance of winning in legal courts, it is unconvincing in the court of public opinion. As more Americans drift away from Christianity, they increasingly view this defense for denying service to same-sex couples not as a valid objection, but as a childish copout: “The Christian God doesn’t like gay people.”

    Rather, it’s important to establish that most Christian churches are established on natural law (that is, moral laws based on objective truth) as much as the Bible. To be sure, faith and reason both matter enormously, but for an increasingly secular populace, actions and policies must be defended on the basis of reason much more than faith.

    This has been the case with abortion, with the pro-life position steadily gaining popular support as it has adopted more reason-based arguments. The pro-life movement has grown because it has argued that unborn babies are people, and therefore abortion is murder. Although the Bible acknowledges this argument, the argument itself isn’t strictly based on the Bible.

    Reasons Against Same-Sex Couples Adopting

    Similarly, in issues involving marriage and children, Christians need to appeal to reason more than their faith. In the case of same-sex couples adopting, two issues need to be addressed. First, do all couples have a right to adopt a child? Second, do children have a right to a father and mother?

    Concerning whether all couples have a right to adopt, the answer is that they do not. As any couple who has gone through the process of adoption understands all too well, many screenings and conditions have to be met. Someone from the adoption agency will inspect their home, rifle through their personal information, interview them and others, and then, after so many legal hurdles, possibly allow a child to live with them. Even then, the biological parent may change his or her mind and take back the child.

    As painful and expensive as this process is, it is necessary because children are human beings with rights of their own, not objects a couple acquires out of boredom or simply some charitable impulse. Consequently, adoption agencies must discriminate among couples wanting to adopt, only selecting those who meet the criteria of good caretakers.

    A Right to a Mother and Father?

    This leads to the second issue of whether a child’s rights include having a mother and father, as opposed to two fathers or two mothers. The science on this is mixed, both because it’s a politically charged issue and because it’s a difficult thing to measure. One may say that a loving committed couple is enough, but one may contend that a loving committed heterosexual couple is necessary.

    Katy Faust persuasively argues this latter view in her excellent book “Them Before Us.” She explains that men and women represent two distinct and essential supports to a child growing up; fatherhood and motherhood are not interchangeable or dispensable. Furthermore, she argues that a child does best with his or her biological parents in nearly all cases. For Faust, adoption is an alternative that should only be considered in cases of serious abuse or neglect.

    Not only does Faust support her argument with a multitude of studies, but she has both a homosexual parent and an adopted child. Even though her situation would suggest that same-sex adoption should be treated the same as any other parental arrangement, her reasoning leads her to think otherwise.

    Faust’s example is a good model for all Christians trying to serve their community in accordance with their values. Whatever charitable work they do — whether it is finding homes for orphans or allowing those orphans to be born in the first place — it is done for the person in need, first and foremost. This is not a political or religious issue, but a human one.

    It is not a coincidence that this means they are doing God’s will in the process. Contrary to what opponents claim, Christian values are based on objective truth, not blind faith to various Bronze Age prejudices. As such, the goal is not about winning, but about making the world a better place.

    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.

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    In Its First Year, Biden’s HHS Relentlessly Attacked Christians and Unborn Babies


    BY: RACHEL N. MORRISON | MARCH 18, 2022

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/18/in-its-first-year-bidens-hhs-relentlessly-attacked-christians-and-unborn-babies/

    becerra

    March 18 marks one year since pro-abortion radical Xavier Becerra was confirmed as President Joe Biden’s appointee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Although both men claim to be faithful Catholics, they have launched unprecedented attacks on people of faith by eliminating vital conscience and religious freedom protections and funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the abortion industry.

    At the HHS Accountability Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., we have been keeping tabs on HHS personnel and policy. The oft-heard maxim “personnel is policy” is no exception for HHS, the largest federal agency by budget. While Becerra was AWOL on the Covid fight, he was outright zealous on culture war issues, leading HHS’s singular focus on pushing pro-abortion and anti-religion policies on the American people.

    Here are the top 10 lowlights for year one.

    1. Dismantling HHS’s Conscience and Religious Freedom Division

    One of Becerra’s early acts as secretary was to strip the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of its independent ability to investigate violations of conscience and religious freedom laws. The division was created during the Trump administration to guarantee enforcement rather than neglect of laws that protect these fundamental and inalienable rights.

    Becerra’s first budget proposal would have effectively eliminated this division as a standalone entity, despite Becerra having promised Congress that “the work [of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division] will not change.” He, along with OCR political staff (such as political ideologue Laura Durso), refused to even consult with the dedicated career professionals of the division while they methodically removed conscience and religious freedom protections from the American people.

    These developments were foreshadowed by transgender activist Dr. Rachel Levine who, prior to being elevated to the number-three position at HHS, proclaimed the division should be “either disbanded or certainly redirected.” 

    2. Removing OCR’s First Amendment Enforcement Power

    Becerra removed OCR’s authority to enforce conscience and religious projections under the bipartisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the First Amendment. A leaked memo revealed this move came at the request of Lisa Pino, the Biden-appointed director of OCR. She is tasked with enforcing civil rights protections in health and human services, not finding ways to remove them.

    Remember, it was HHS under Obama that went after the Little Sisters of the Poor and lost under RFRA. Now Becerra has removed the only internal entity that would hold HHS accountable to the law.

    3. Pushing a Ridiculously ‘Woke’ Budget

    The Biden-Becerra HHS budget for fiscal year 2022 removed references to “conscience,” “religion,” and “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.” But don’t worry, the new budget replaces references to these constitutional and statutory rights HHS is responsible for enforcing with a bunch of woke terms like “equity” — the Biden administration’s preferred priority.

    4. Backing Forcing Nuns to Pay for Abortion

    While Becerra was attorney general of California before becoming HHS secretary, OCR issued two notices of violation against Becerra and his state for violating federal conscience protections by forcing nuns (and others) to provide insurance coverage of abortion. Apart from the clear conflict of interest with Becerra leading the very office that previously found him in violation of the law, OCR under Becerra “reassessed” the conscience violations, magically finding there were none.

    5. Abandoning Nurse Illegally Forced to Participate in Abortion

    In 2019, OCR found a hospital had violated a nurse’s conscience rights by forcing her to participate in an abortion over her known conscience objection. When the hospital refused to change its policies to comply with the law, the federal government sued the hospital in federal court.

    But on Becerra’s watch and despite his many promises to continue enforcing federal conscience laws, the Biden administration quietly dismissed the case without any settlement, agreement, or compensation for the nurse. Because federal conscience protection laws do not provide a private right of action, she cannot sue on her own and the violating hospital has been let off with impunity.

    6. Relentlessly Pushing Abortion With Federal Resources

    In response to Texas’ law protecting unborn children with beating hearts from abortion, the Biden-Becerra HHS announced, despite prohibitions on federal funds going to abortion, ways the department could “bolster access to safe and legal abortions in Texas.” HHS is awarding $10 million in additional funding to increase access to abortifacients for those affected by the Texas law.

    OCR issued pro-abortion guidance explaining how a federal conscience protection law can protect abortion providers and patients seeking abortions. If HHS’s actions weren’t clear enough, Becerra stated, “We are telling doctors and others involved in the provision of abortion care, that we have your back.” Becerra and OCR clearly don’t want to enforce the law for those who do not want to participate in abortion.

    7. Directly Funding Big Abortion

    Becerra, who has oddly and repeatedly refused to acknowledge that partial-birth abortion is illegal, led HHS’s charge to fund Big Abortion. In 2021, Planned Parenthood received more than $5.4 million in taxpayer funds from HHS, an amount that is sure to increase over the next three years.

    In an effort to further fund Planned Parenthood, the Biden-Becerra HHS ignored democratic norms to rush through new Title X regulations. Title X is a federal program that provides grants for a range of family planning services, but per the statute, such services cannot include abortion.

    The new regulations, however, remove the requirement of physical and financial separation between Title X projects and abortion services, require abortion counseling and referrals, and remove conscience protections for Title X providers. Planned Parenthood had dropped out of the Title X program under those regulations, forfeiting that funding stream, but under the new regulations the abortion giant is expected to receive significant Title X funding.

    8. Comingling Insurance Payments for Abortion

    Last summer, HHS rushed through new insurance regulations that, contrary to the text of the Affordable Care Act, no longer require separate insurance payments for abortion services, allowing those payments to be comingled with payments for other covered services. Besides violating the law, combined payments create a lack of transparency and accountability. Consumers with conscience objections to abortion will no longer be on notice that their insurance plan covers abortion or that they are subsidizing abortions, including for any adult children on their plan.

    9. Rescinding Faith-Based Waivers

    Prompting a congressional inquiry, the Biden-Becerra HHS gratuitously rescinded waivers previously issued to faith-based adoption and foster care agencies in Michigan, South Carolina, and Texas that allowed the agencies to qualify for HHS grants while operating in accordance with their deeply held religious beliefs. In the press release announcing the rescission, Becerra unironically stated: “At HHS, we treat any violation of civil rights or religious freedoms seriously.”

    Please. This action comes on the heels of a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court affirming the constitutional right of foster-care agencies to act according to their religious beliefs on human sexuality in certifying foster parents.  

    10. Issuing Totalitarian Anti-Conscience Rules

    HHS announced its new interpretation and enforcement of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act that would force health-care professionals to perform gender transition surgeries and provide minors with harmful and sterilizing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. A new rule codifying this interpretation is anticipated in April and would likely not exempt providers with medical or conscience objections. HHS is also planning to rescind conscience regulations that protect health-care professionals from being forced to assist with abortions and protect others from having to pay for abortions.

    Rachel N. Morrison is an attorney and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project.

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    Democrats’ Massive Entitlement Plans Include Banning Christians From Government Childcare


    Reported By Joy Pullmann | DECEMBER 13, 2021

    Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/democrats-massive-entitlement-plans-include-banning-christians-from-government-childcare/

    Democrats’ current proposed $3.5 trillion welfare expansion would effectively ban faithful Christians from profiting from federal subsidies for separating infants and toddlers from their families. The current text of Democrats’ massive “Build Back Better” entitlement bill contains provisions that would require religious child-care providers to disavow longstanding theology about sex in order to receive federal child-care funds under a massive new early childhood program.

    “The Democrats went out of their way to make sure and prohibit religious care providers from receiving any of these funds, and unanimously rejected an amendment to allow all child-care providers to be eligible for grants, including religious providers,” said Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Indiana, the ranking member on the House’s subcommittee on Worker and Family Support.

    Democrats’ legislation would create a new federally controlled child-care entitlement available to the majority of families in the nation. The legislation authorizes up to $20 billion in the program’s first year, $30 billion in its second, $40 billion in its third, and an unlimited amount after that. The estimated cost of this program over the next ten years is $400 billion.

    “Making faith-based providers of child-care and pre-kindergarten into recipients of federal financial assistance triggers federal compliance obligations and non-discrimination provisions,” note the leaders of several religious organizations in an opposition letter to Senate Democrats last week.

    This means potentially forcing religious organizations to deny all theology that acknowledges basic truths about human biology and reproduction. Given the state of federal “nondiscrimination” law, this could include forcing religious organizations to allow males into female bathrooms, hire transgender babysitters, and teach small children that men can turn themselves into women and that theologically condemned sex acts are in fact morally good.

    Just one-third of American children younger than five are placed in center-based care, according to federal statistics. Sixty-three percent of American kids ages five and younger are cared for by family, and 11 percent by a babysitter or nanny. Most American kids ages 0 to 5 who do have regular childcare are away from their parents only part-time. Among the minority of American families who enroll young children in full-time care, 53 percent currently choose a religious facility, according to a January 2021 survey of parents from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Family care was parents’ top preference for their children, with religious-based care the second-most preferred option in the BPC poll.

    Democrats’ bill would also likely dramatically increase the costs of childcare by increasing the licensing requirements for people the government pays to babysit tiny children. Most child care workers have low education levels, but states usually don’t raise their licensing requirements because that would reduce the availability of government-controlled child care.

    Numerous studies have found that the quality of language and interaction available to a child in infancy and early childhood is extremely important to that child’s intellectual and social development. Studies have also found that frequent one-on-one interaction between a small child and his parents benefits early language development even if the child’s parents are poorly educated. This effect disappears, however, if that poorly educated mother is employed to care for many tiny children at once instead of one of her own to whom she can fully dedicate her attention and conversation time.

    Research also resoundingly finds that living with married parents provides far bigger positive benefits to children for their entire lives than does attending an early childhood program.

    Large early childhood programs are of notoriously poor quality. The major existing such program, Head Start, has failed to improve attendees’ education and life prospects in all the quality research done on the program that has spent some $250 billion from taxpayers since it began in 1965. In fact, federal research has found that children who participated in Head Start later learned less in math and behaved worse than peers who didn’t participate.

    The research that shows any long-term benefit to children of attending early childhood programs derives such results from small-scale, boutique programs that employed teachers and support staff such as doctors who were much better educated than the typical daycare or preschool employee.

    Research also shows mass programs that separate small children from their parents decrease children’s intellectual abilities and increase their aggression, risky behavior, and later likelihood of committing crimes. They also tend to erode parenting skills. The more time a small child spends away from his mother, the worse such negative effects tend to get.

    “The amount of hours spent in day care each week during the first four years of life was the key child care predictor of behavioral problems,” writes social scientist Dr. Jenet Erickson in a review of several such studies. “In fact, the statistical effect size of the relationship between day care hours and caregiver reports of behavioral problems at age four and a half was so strong that it was comparable to the effect of poverty. Importantly, these statistical effects did not diminish as children aged.”

    High-quality studies found that children who attended Tennessee’s state-run pre-K program had worse behavior and academic outcomes than children who did not. Children who attended Quebec’s universal early childcare program were 22 percent more likely to be convicted of a crime in young adulthood compared to children who did not participate in the program. Children separated from their parents in their youngest years through Quebec’s program also demonstrated greater emotional fragility that lasted into adulthood.

    “The left is at war with religion and family-centered things. They think cradle to grave, government knows best,” Walorski said.

    Walorski has sponsored legislation that would expand tax-free savings accounts families can use to pay for their own child care, tutoring, enrichment activities such as music lessons and summer camp, and more.

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    82% of Americans say religious freedom is key to ‘healthy American society’: poll


    Reported By Michael Gryboski, Christian Post Reporter | Wednesday, June 23, 2021

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/82-see-religious-freedom-as-key-to-healthy-us-society-rasmussen.html/

    Religious freedom
    Religious freedom supporters hold a rally to praise the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby, contraception coverage requirement case on June 30, 2014, in Chicago, Illinois. Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby, which operates a chain of arts-and-craft stores, challenged the provision and the high court ruled 5-4 that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception and abortion-inducing drugs under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

    More than four-fifths of surveyed Americans believe that freedom of religion is an important aspect of a “healthy American society,” according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports and Summit Ministries.

    In findings announced Tuesday, the report found that 67% of respondents said freedom of religion is “very important to a healthy American society,” while 15% said it was “somewhat important to a healthy American society.”

    Some 9% of respondents said they believe freedom of religion was either “not very important” or “not at all important” to a “healthy American society,” while 9% said they were unsure.

    Party affiliation only offered slight variance, as 86% of Republican respondents said freedom of religion is very important or somewhat important, while 83% of Independents and 79% of Democrats also responded that it was very or somewhat important.

    The poll also found that 50% of Americans believe that churches and faith-based charities should not be required by law to hire people who oppose their religious beliefs, while 20% of Americans say they should be required, and 30% of Americans were not sure.

    Summit President Jeff Myers said in a statement included in the announcement that he believed the findings showed “that the American people overwhelmingly support the continued protection of the Constitutional right of freedom of religion.”

    “Yet, leaders in Washington, D.C., are aggressively pushing forward on legislative measures such as the mislabeled Equality Act, which specifically strips away religious freedom protections,” stated Myers.

    “In an era of hyper-partisanship, freedom of religion retains broad, bi-partisan support among Democrats, Republicans and Independents.”

    The poll drew from a sample of 1,000 likely voters in the United States, being conducted June 16-17 and with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

    Earlier this month, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in which they conclude that a Christian foster agency could not be forced to place kids in same-sex households.

    Known as Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the high court ruled city officials were wrong to quit working with Catholic Social Services of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for refusing on religious grounds to place children with same-sex couples.

    “Government fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the court.

    “The refusal of Philadelphia to contract with CSS for the provision of foster care services unless it agrees to certify same-sex couples as foster parents cannot survive strict scrutiny, and violates the First Amendment.”  

    Follow Michael Gryboski on Twitter or Facebook

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    Richard D. Land Op-ed: The First Amendment religion clauses: ‘Full-throated’ freedom or ‘mere’ toleration?


    Commentary By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor| Friday, May 21, 2021

    Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/news/first-amendment-on-religion-full-throated-or-mere-toleration.html/

    Richard Land
    (Photo: The Christian Post/Katherine T. Phan)

    Last week I wrote my column on “The First Amendment: Alive and well?” in which I noted the revolutionary impact of the Amendment on religious freedom in particular and on human rights in general. 

    The First Amendment has indeed proven itself to be a magnificent legal and political engine driving the cause of soul freedom and freedom of conscience in America first, and subsequently as a shining beacon of light and hope to a suppression-weary world.

    This week I want to address the current tension that has arisen among various groups of Americans over what was the Founding Father’s ‘original intent,’ and how should the First Amendment be applied to today’s ever-more ethically and religiously diverse populace.  Columnist Judd Birdsall has conveniently and helpfully divided and labeled the two camps as “First Freedom” and “Article 18,” personified by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (2018-2021) and current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

    Pompeo was the most openly evangelical Secretary of State since William Jennings Bryan (1913-1915) in the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Pompeo, as Secretary of State, took virtually unprecedented actions and initiatives to promote religious freedom worldwide. His unprecedented efforts yielded encouraging results with two very well attended ministerial events at the State Department, including one that was hailed as the largest meeting promoting religious freedom ever held at the State Department.

    Pompeo and then-President Trump were leading exponents, along with the late Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, of the First Freedom view that argues that religious freedom is not just first sequentially because it touches on questions of “ultimate significance and the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly are there to aid and buttress the ‘first freedom’.”

    Proponents of the Article 18 view, vocalized by current Secretary of State Blinken, argue that religious freedom, while crucially important, is “co-equal” with the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and peaceful redress of grievance.

    I believe, however, based on my observation and experience, that there is disagreement on an issue of fundamental importance at stake in this debate.

    I had the privilege of serving as a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2001-2012. This Commission, set up by the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act, is an independent, federal government commission, not under the State Department or Congress, charged with monitoring the state of religious freedom in every country in the world. They are required to write an annual report about the state of religious freedom in each country, followed by recommendations to both the President and the Congress on ways in which American foreign aid can, and should be, used to promote religious freedom.

    The Commission is structured to be extremely bi-partisan. When you have a Democrat president, for example, he appoints three commissioners and the Democratic leader in the House and in the Senate nominate one commissioner each and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate nominate two each. So, the President’s party has a one-vote majority (5-4) and it takes six votes for the Commission to act.

    During my years there, we would periodically undertake fact-finding trips to various countries around the world to measure for ourselves how much religious freedom was actually afforded to citizens in those countries. Undoubtedly the most memorable fact-finding trip we undertook during my tenure on the Commission was an almost two weeks visit to Communist China and Tibet in 2005.

    This visit took place during what turned out to be a temporary “spring of hope” when the Chinese Communist government appeared to be relaxing many of its very oppressive policies against Christians in that country. Alas, the promised reforms were still-born and the situation has degenerated drastically for all religious faiths in China, with the Uyghur Muslims suffering what can only be called a genocidal policy.

    Invariably, on these site visits, we Commissioners went to great lengths to make it crystal clear to the host country that the USCIRF standard was not America’s First Amendment standard that guaranteed complete religious liberty and freedom from government interference with people’s religious free expression rights. We often said that we would recommend it, but we could not demand it because that would interfere with the host nation’s sovereignty.

    The USCIRF standard was the international one – the one codified in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, which reads:

    Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and
    religion, this right includes freedom to change his religious belief, and
    freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or
    private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice,
    worship and observance.

    So, what is the difference between the First Amendment and the Universal Declaration’s Article 18? The First Freedom position legally restricts the government from interjecting itself into the religious experience and practice of its people.

    Quite simply, the First Amendment guarantees people from government interference with their religion. The Article 18 position merely guarantees some level of toleration for dissenting faiths in a society where Islam or Communist oppression may take over and rescind government support or toleration. 

    For example, when we were in China it became apparent that the Chinese officials were increasingly irritated that we were not more impressed with the comparatively greater toleration they had been granting people of faith.

    In our final exit dinner with the Chinese officials, I was designated to explain the Commission’s position. I did so in the following way: “It has become apparent to us that you are frustrated that our team has not been more impressed with the greater degree of toleration you have been affording many religious groups in your country. We have noticed.  However, while it is a bigger cage, and it is a gilded cage, it is still a cage. And that is toleration, not freedom.”

    Sadly, history has proven our position correct since the Chinese have cracked down drastically and have made the cage very small.  

    Under Article 18, each country could make Islam or some other religion, the official state religion supported by the people’s taxes. Under the First Freedom system that would not or could not happen.

    In other words, under the First Freedom position, the people are sovereign and no religion can discriminate against them or hamper their mission. 

    As Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote over a half-century ago in the famous Supreme Court prayer decision (School District of Abington, Pennsylvania et.al V. Schemp et.al):

    “The fullest realization of true religious liberty requires that government neither engage in, nor compel religious practices, that it effects no favoritism among sects or between religion and nonreligion. . .”  then Justice Goldberg went on to declare that “the attitude of government toward religion must be one of neutrality.” Justice Goldberg then went on to say that even “untutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to approval of results which partake not simply of that non-interference and non-involvement with the religious which the constitution demands, but of a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but it seems to me “are prohibited by it.”

    Justice Goldberg warns, quite correctly, that even with the government neutrality required by the First Amendment freedom from government interference in religion must be carefully monitored. With mere toleration, you will always have government abuses against religion.

    The conflict between First Freedom advocates and Article 18 supporters is clearly a “full-throated” freedom vs. “mere” toleration debate. Those who deny that this is the case either fail to comprehend the problem, or they support mere toleration.

    ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR:

    Dr. Richard Land, BA (magna cum laude), Princeton; D.Phil. Oxford; and Th.M., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, was president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) and has served since 2013 as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Land has been teaching, writing, and speaking on moral and ethical issues for the last half century in addition to pastoring several churches. He is the author of The Divided States of America, Imagine! A God Blessed America, Real Homeland Security, For Faith & Family and Send a Message to Mickey.

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