VIDEO: The Unspoken Horrors of Gender Transition Surgery

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Gender Transition Surgery: Dreams Turned to Nightmares.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Children are increasingly lured into “gender-affirming” hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgeries, are never given appropriate informed consent, and they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Many adults even underestimate how difficult and painful it will be
  • All it takes for a young girl to start the gender transition process to become a boy is a letter of support from a therapist. Typically, the therapist will write a letter of support after just one or two visits. Next, she’ll be sent to an endocrinologist who, after a single visit, will prescribe her testosterone
  • Some gender transition centers don’t even require any kind of mental health assessment, and several Planned Parenthood clinics are apparently handing out hormone replacement therapy (HRT) prescriptions on the first visit
  • While some pro-trans advocates insist HRT is harmless and reversible once you quit taking the hormones, this simply isn’t true. The effects of testosterone on a girl can be both profound and permanent, and can be seen within a matter of months
  • The transgender movement is a stepping stone in the transhumanist agenda. Ultimately, the goal is to get rid of flesh and blood bodies altogether and have our existence either within a synthetic body or as disembodied avatar in cyberspace, or both. Turning humanity into misgendered people incapable of natural reproduction is merely a first step in that direction

In the video above, WhatsHerFace Entertainment dives into the “unspoken reality of transgender sexual reassignment surgery and all of the pain, regret and horrors it entails.”

Most clear-headed adults would realize that surgically and chemically altering your anatomy from male to female, or female to male, is a complex and painful process. The problem is that it’s typically not level-headed adults making the decision to undergo gender reassignment. It’s primarily children who are being pushed into it, and they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into. Many adults don’t even realize how difficult and painful it will be.

As reported by WhatsHerFace, all it takes for a young girl to start the gender transition process to become a boy is a letter of support from a therapist. Typically, the therapist will write a letter of support after just one or two visits. Next, she’ll be sent to an endocrinologist who, after a single visit, will prescribe her testosterone.

While that’s alarmingly lax enough, some gender transition centers have cut through even that tiny bit of red tape. Some don’t require any kind of mental health assessment, and a number of Planned Parenthood clinics are apparently handing out hormone replacement therapy (HRT) prescriptions on the first visit.

Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) Is Not Harmless

While some pro-trans advocates insist that HRT is harmless and completely reversible once you quit taking the hormones, this simply isn’t true.1 As reported by WhatsHerFace, the effects of testosterone on a girl can be both profound and permanent and can be seen within a matter of months. Effects of high-dose testosterone treatment include:

Voice deepening

 Facial hair growth
Hair loss, receding hairline, balding Increased libido
Sexual dysfunction Increased aggression and unpredictable moods
Sterility Enlargement of clitoris
Vaginal atrophy

As noted by Cleveland Clinic,2 many of these changes persist even if you completely stop taking testosterone. Can a child or teenager fully comprehend what sterility might mean to them later in life? I don’t think so. I also don’t think they can comprehend how other physical and emotional changes might affect them, such as going bald.

Other types of hormone therapy include puberty blockers, which are given to children who have not yet entered puberty. These drugs delay the onset of sex characteristics associated with the gender you were assigned at birth.

What’s particularly shocking is that the adults steering them toward gender reassignment don’t make it a point to thoroughly inform them about the difficulties they might face. Overall, I don’t think children and teens are capable of making the decision to transition, and encouraging or facilitating it really ought to be illegal.

Double-Mastectomies Performed at 15

While you’re considered too immature to get a full, unrestricted driver’s license until you’re 18, and can’t drink alcohol until you’re 21, “gender-affirming” sex hormone therapy can begin as early as 14,3 girls who think they’re boys can get a double-mastectomy at the age of 15, and full sex reassignment surgery is available at age 17 or 18, depending on the procedure, although the World Professional Association for Transgender Health is advocating for surgeries as early as 15.4

The Boston Children’s Hospital requires you to be 17 to undergo vaginoplasty, where a boy’s penis, testicles and scrotum are removed and a vagina is created, and 18 to undergo phalloplasty, the surgical construction of a penis, or metoidioplasty, where testosterone is used to enlarge the clitoris, from which a small penis is then constructed. Prosthetic testicles are also added in both of those cases.

Understanding Female-to-Male Reassignment Surgery

When a biological woman decides to surgically become a man, she’ll undergo phalloplasty, which involves taking large sections of skin from her forearms and/or thigh to fashion a penis. As you can see from the images included in WhatsHerFace’s video, this will leave a very large unsightly scar on one or both forearms, and while the donation site heals, there’s always a risk of infection.

Since the donation site needs to be hairless, electrolysis must first be performed. If electrolysis fails and hair grows back in the donated skin, the trans male may struggle with painful hair growth inside his urethra for the rest of his life.

Trans men who are on testosterone also face gynecological challenges, especially vaginal dryness, and vaginal atrophy, which can be very painful. Pelvic pain and bacterial vaginosis are other commonly reported issues.5,6

Understanding Male-to-Female Reassignment Surgery

During vaginoplasty, which is where a biological male surgically transitions to female, the surgeon will use skin from the patient’s scrotum to create a vaginal canal. If additional skin grafts are needed, they’ll use skin from the sides of their abdomen.

Before the skin grafts are taken, he must undergo electrolysis on the chosen donor sites. However, electrolysis does not always permanently eliminate hair growth, especially not male hair growth, which tends to be more profuse, and if the hair grows back, the trans male can end up with hair growing in his vaginal canal.

Vaginoplasties aren’t always successful, and if they must be redone, a part of the patient’s colon will typically be used instead. A downside of this procedure, called colovaginoplasty, is an offensive discharge odor.

After vaginoplasty, the patient must then dilate the vagina on a daily basis. This basically entails stretching (dilating) the vagina using a lubricated dildo to prevent it from sealing shut. Your body basically views this new opening as a wound and will do what it can to heal it. Trans women must do this several times a day for the rest of their lives.

Dreams That Nightmares Are Made Of

Dilation is one of the challenges of male-to-female sex reassignment surgery (SRS) that most people underestimate. Here’s one testimony included in WhatsHerFace’s video.

“Three months ago, I started this ‘dream’ (nightmarish hell) that is SRS … Dilating is Hell, everything is sensitive or sore, my … leg movements are, while better than before, still pretty limited. I feel constant stinging and burning sensations pretty much around the clock in my crotch area.

This is probably the most suicidal I’ve ever been since before I actually transitioned. This ‘vaginal canal’ (which is actually a f***ing open wound) has given me nothing but grievances and Jesus f*** am I tired of it.

I’ve actually been considering asking my surgeon whether or not it’s possible to just close this pseudo-vaginal canal or just get rid of it all together. I wish somebody had told me even just a third of what a hellride this was going to be. But nobody did. And now I’m stuck with this nightmare.

I’m pretty much considering just stopping dilation. ‘The canal will shrink,’ so what? Maintaining it is pretty much keeping my whole … life prisoner of this thing. While I didn’t like what I had before, at all, it still allowed me freedom … For comparison, this shit is like going from parole straight into solitary confinement.”

Sure, you might think, but that’s just recovery. Eventually, all will be well. Maybe, maybe not. Here are the words of a trans female who is still struggling three years after her vaginoplasty.

“Suicidal thoughts. Three years post-op SRS and still having discharge and pain … I had SRS in 2016, August … and I’m experiencing discharge and pain again from my neovagina after it had gone away for two years. Orgasming is very difficult these days and when I do I feel less than half of what I used to feel down there.

I am normally a very strong person who doesn’t easily give up but over the last couple of weeks I find myself crying myself asleep almost every night. Wondering why I had to get this surgery.

Since the surgery I haven’t dated anyone and everyone I have been on a date with turned me down diplomatically when I came out and discussed that I have a neovagina. I’m not saying no one should get this surgery and I’m sure there are people who have amazing results but far too often I hear that people experience complications from SRS.

I find life very draining these days. I have to clean my vagina with isobetadine to keep smell away and to keep the discharge at bay. I have to dilate once a day still. I should have thought things more carefully through. I thought SRS was a wonderful end point to a difficult journey. It opened up a whole other can of worms.

I could have just had anal sex and left my genitals alone and maybe have the testicles removed. Doing something so taxing as having the tissues inverted turned out to be such a bad idea. I wish I could just have the vagina closed up at this point. I don’t see myself ever having sex again either way. I know I should be grateful for having had a surgery of 22,000 CAD paid for by the government. But I feel lied to. I feel so stupid.”

Parents Are Removed From the Equation

Consider those words, and then consider that pro-trans ideology is now being openly taught in kindergarten through high school across the U.S. Children are being brainwashed into thinking they can choose their own gender and that it’s as easy to switch genders as it is to switch clothes. It’s not.

Yet, the horrors of SRS are being so well hidden that neither parents nor their trans children understand what’s in store, both in the short and long term. While there are cases where everything goes right and the boy or girl finally feels “complete” after SRS,7 there seem to be far more cases where they end up even more miserable.

What’s worse, some states, like Washington, are considering laws that severely infringe on parent’s rights to be involved in their child’s decision to transition. For example, as reported by ZeroHedge:8

“April 12 [2023], House lawmakers debated Senate Bill 5599,9 which creates an exemption for the state that grants it the right to not be required to notify parents of minors who have left their homes because their parents wouldn’t let them pursue gender transition medical procedures …

Republican state Rep. Chris Corry said the bill ‘erodes parental rights in the state of Washington.’ ‘Essentially what the bill would do would be if a child left a parents’ home for certain medical care and went to a shelter or host family, that shelter or host family would not be required to notify the parents of their child’s whereabouts,’ Corry said.

‘This is obviously a fundamental violation of parental rights and something that’s deeply concerning for parents across Washington state.’ State Rep. Peter Abbarno, a Republican, said the crux of the debate over the bill was whether the state be permitted to ‘essentially hide where the child is.’

Most parents, Corry said, would ‘go to the ends of the earth to find their child’ if they disappeared after an argument. ‘And the fact that we have a bill that may become law that would say, ‘we’re not going to tell you,’ was really just a bridge too far for us,’ Corry said.

Corry told The Epoch Times that, under the bill, a disagreement between a child and parents over the child’s desire for a medical transition constitutes ‘abuse and neglect,’ only because the parent hasn’t ‘properly affirmed what the child wants.’

Corry said there are already laws that protect children from abuse and neglect in the state that require ‘solid and compelling reasons’ why children would need to be removed from their homes. ‘What’s frustrating is even in those cases, the parents still have a right to know where their kids are after they’ve been removed,’ Corry said. ‘In this case, parents would have no idea.’”

Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria: A Social Contagion

According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, data from Western countries suggest gender dysphoria is now at 8% among children,10 compared to just a fraction of a percent among older adults.11

Kids who question their gender but aren’t good candidates for permanent transitioning may be as high as 1 in 5!12 In the U.S., research suggests 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds identify as trans, compared to 1.6% of 30- to 49-year-olds and only 0.3% of those 50 and older.13

How is this even possible? How is it that so many young people are suddenly gender confused? Social pressure appears to have a lot to do with it, and that includes pressure from adults, such as school teachers. But widespread trauma may also play a role.

According to a 2018 transgender identity study14 described in Psychology Today,15 “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) “appears to be a novel condition that emerges from cohort and contagion effects and novel social pressures.”

As such, its etiology and epidemiology is distinct from conventional gender dysphoria described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Remarkably, 80% of the teens identifying as transgender were girls identifying as boys.

Not surprisingly for those of us who understand how the internet is being used to manipulate impressionable minds, 63.5% of parents reported that shortly before their child announced they were trans, they’d noticed a marked increase in social media consumption. In particular, parents had noticed their child was following popular YouTubers who discussed their transition.

Signs of Indoctrination

Among the many surprises discovered in that study, the investigator, Dr. Lisa Littman, a behavioral scientist at Brown University, found that one of the many beliefs espoused by these trans teens was that anyone who isn’t specifically transgendered is “evil,” including gays and lesbians. As reported by Psychology Today:16

“Parents further reported being derogatorily called ‘breeders’ by their children, or being routinely harassed by children who played ‘pronoun-police.’ The observation that they no longer recognized their child’s voice came up time and again in parental reports.

In turn, the eerie similarity between the youth’s discourse and trans-positive online content was repeatedly emphasized. Youth were described as ‘sounding scripted,’ ‘reading from a script,’ ‘wooden,’ ‘like a form letter,’ ‘verbatim,’ ‘word for word,’ or ‘practically copy and paste.’”

To me, the fact that trans teens sound like carbon-copies of each other is a sign of indoctrination. A script has been unleashed, and trans activists are repeating that script with the aim of indoctrinating its audience. We saw the same thing happen during COVID. Mainstream media repeated the script of the official COVID narrative, word for word, day in and day out. Repetition — that’s how you indoctrinate people.

Now, we also have the added pressures of corporations that view the trans agenda as a cash cow (although most who have gone that route are finding out the hard way that trans is still a tiny minority of their customer base, and the rest are not willing to encourage the fomentation of a mental health problem).

Even if corporate CEOs aren’t gung-ho about the trans agenda, many are lured in that direction because they want to optimize their corporate equality index (CEI).

Is Transgenderism a Maladapted Collective Stress Response?

That said, Littman hypothesized that ROGD may be a maladaptive coping mechanism for other underlying mental health issues or trauma. In essence, it may be a form of maladapted collective stress response. Psychology Today wrote:17

“It is clear from Littman’s study that the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, which seems to predominantly involve natal females, points to a complex web of social pressures, changing cultural norms, and new modes of distress and coping that warrant further investigation. For parents, educators, and clinicians alike, caution is warranted in dealing with this growing phenomenon.”

Cui Bono?

So, who benefits from this maladaptive groupthink? Primarily, that would be hospitals, doctors and surgeons conducting gender reassignment surgeries, and, of course, Big Pharma. The cost for a complete sex change costs, on average, $132,000, but can run as high as $200,000 to $300,000 by the time everything is said and done.

Dr. Robert Malone18 recently calculated it would cost $102 billion to transition the current cohort of young adults (a total of 2.58 million kids, teens, and young adults between the ages of 10 and 24) who believe they’re trans. Right now, that’s an untapped market, and it’s quite clear the health care industry is chomping at the bit to get it going.

At present, insurance companies do not have to cover the cost of sex reassignment surgery, but that could soon change, as the Affordable Care Act website is actively encouraging trans people to sue for unlawful sex discrimination.19

What’s Behind the Trans Agenda?

In closing, it’s worth noting that many of the same people who attacked circumcision and fought against body shaming are now promoting transgenderism, which seems to be dehumanizing to the point of self-mutilation.

In the video above, self-proclaimed feminist and investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek discusses the forces behind the trans movement and “gender-affirming medical care” for children.

In short, it’s a stepping stone in the transhumanist agenda. Ultimately, the goal is to get rid of flesh and blood bodies altogether and have our existence either within a synthetic body or as disembodied avatar in cyberspace, or both.

Turning humanity into misgendered people incapable of natural reproduction is merely a first step in that direction. Next comes the melding of man with machine and artificial intelligence. Over time, the flesh and blood part of humans will be reduced while the synthetic parts will increase.

They want the younger generations to get comfortable with the transhumanist idea that gender is fluid and based on how you feel, rather than what you are, as well as the idea that you shouldn’t want to reproduce, because human reproduction will be outsourced to the tech industry.

As explained by Bilek, the trans ideology promotes the idea that you can choose your gender, even though that is a biological impossibility, because that’s a steppingstone to the grander ideology that you can exist without a body altogether, in cyberspace, where you can be whomever you want.

They want the younger generations to get comfortable with the idea that gender is fluid and based on how you feel, rather than what you are, as well as the idea that you shouldn’t want to reproduce, because human reproduction will be outsourced to the tech industry.

Over the past decade, Bilek notes, the trans argument has gone from “some people are born in the wrong body,” to simply advocating for the right to augment yourself in whatever way you see fit, to add or strip yourself of whatever appendages you don’t want. According to Bilek, it’s a fetish-based cult, and seemingly rational people are buying into it, not understanding what it’s all about.

I believe the transgender movement poses a severe threat to mental, emotional and physical health, and must be counteracted by level-headed discourse. How can anyone say they’re concerned about children’s health and welfare while simultaneously promoting irreversible surgeries that will pose lifelong risks to their health and render many of them sterile?

It’s one thing to change a child’s pronouns. It’s another to cut off their breasts and penises just because they say they feel at odds with their — for now — elected gender. The very idea that a child should be allowed to decide with such lifelong implications as mutilating their sex organs is incomprehensibly negligent.

And when you consider the hidden motive behind this movement, it reinforces the anti-human, anti-humane nature of it, because children, who are our future, are being physically and psychologically sacrificed to further an ideology that seeks to destroy the human species and turn it into something it’s not.

Sources and References:

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Top State Judge Handling Climate Lawsuit Worked With Environmental Group Tied To Plaintiffs’ Lawyers

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The Chief Justice of Hawaii’s Supreme Court, who is hearing Honolulu’s lawsuit against oil and gas companies for climate damages, has worked with a D.C-based environmental group that has close ties to the plaintiff’s attorneys.

Honolulu’s lawsuit against Sunoco, Shell, Chevron and other companies is one of many lawsuits cities have filed against energy companies in an effort to extract alleged damages for the firms’ contributions to climate change; the Supreme Court declined to hear these lawsuits in April, pushing them back to state courts—meaning Honolulu’s case is now squarely before Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald. However, on May 9, Recktenwald disclosed that he engages in “educational presentations relating to environmental, energy, and natural resource issues” and has worked with the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), a group which routinely collaborates with environmental activists.

ELI co-founded the Climate Judiciary Project, which developed a climate science and law curriculum for judges handling environment litigation, and has worked closely with individuals who have consulted for or been employed by the environmental activist legal firm representing Honolulu in its lawsuit, Sher Edling LLP.

“Judges are supposed to not only be impartial, but to maintain the appearance of impartiality so that the public can have faith in their rulings,” Rob Schilling, Executive Director of Energy Policy Advocates, a nonprofit that works for transparency in energy policy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It appears that the judge may have attended (or even presented at!) seminars organized for those on one side of this type of case. Those on the other side were not permitted to present their view, and the seminar took place outside of the courtroom and outside the protections provided by the rules of evidence.”

Recktenwald presented a remote course, “Rising Seas and Litigation: What Judges Need to Know About Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise,” in collaboration with the Environmental Law Institute on April 4, according to his disclosure. Recktenwald also presented at a December 2022 ELI webinar on “Hurricanes in a Changing Climate and Related Litigation and a 2020 symposium on “Judiciary And The Environmental Rule of Law: Adjudicating Our Future,” which was also in collaboration with ELI but was omitted from his May 9 disclosure.

Moreover, those connected to ELI and the CJP curriculum’s development have direct links to Sher Edling.

Ann Carlson, President Joe Biden’s nominee for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) administrator who served on the board of directors for the Environmental Law Institute from 2016 to 2020, previously consulted for Sher Edling and solicited donations on behalf of the firm, according to Fox News.

Carlson, who is a professor at UCLA Law School’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment Center, which previously hosted events supporting the cause of climate lawsuits, was also an advisor for ELI’s curriculum instructing judges on how to examine climate-based cases.

She also used money from funds she had access to at UCLA, titled the “Ann Carlson Discretionary Fund,” to help fund a 2019 trip that allowed her to “encourage Hawaii to consider a nuisance lawsuit,” according to emails obtained by Climate Litigation Watch. Honolulu filed its lawsuit in March 2020.

Michael Burger, who currently works on climate cases at Sher Edling in his capacity as Of Counsel, has spoken at an ELI briefing and conference. Burger has also filed multiple amicus briefs in support of cities suing oil and gas companies as executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.

Former Sher Edling employee Meredith Wilensky was a Public Interest Law Fellow at the Environmental Law Institute before she joined the firm in 2017, according to LinkedIn.

Schilling said the connection to the law firm backing plaintiffs in these climate lawsuits is “clear.”

“In short, after the climate plaintiffs lost in California and New York, with one judge not only keeping the case in federal court but requesting a day of evidence on the science, the Environmental Law Institute scrambled to organize what became this running operation to get the plaintiffs’ case in front of as many judges as possible,” he said. “Their materials don’t even bother a nod at [subtlety].”

Northern District of California Judge William Alsup tossed climate cases from San Francisco and Oakland in June 2018, and Southern District of New York Judge John F. Keenan tossed a case from New York City in July 2018. The Climate Judiciary Project was launched in April 2019.

“As the body of climate litigation grows, judges must consider complex scientific and legal questions, many of which are developing rapidly,” its website states. “To address these issues, the Climate Judiciary Project of the Environmental Law Institute is collaborating with leading national judicial education institutions to meet judges’ need for basic familiarity with climate science methods and concepts.”

Modules in the Climate Judiciary Project’s curriculum from January 2023 include “Overview of Climate Litigation,” “Judicial Remedies for Climate Disruption: A Preliminary Analysis,” and “Procedural Techniques Available for Climate Litigation.”

Recktenwald notes in his disclosure that he also intends to present at a June 20 virtual event titled, “Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Disputes: The Use of Special Masters in Resolving Complex Litigation,” as co-chair of the Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Committee of the Conferences of Chief Justices and Chief Court Administrators. His notice asks “any party who has concerns” about his participation to object by May 19, 2023.

“And so, these seminars parade a series of plaintiffs’ witnesses and supportive amicus brief filers before potential judges,” Schilling said. “In fact, another activist seminar presenter, Prof. Charles Fletcher, just sought leave from the Hawai’i Supreme Court on Friday to file an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs.”

Recktenwald isn’t the only judge who has participated in ELI seminars. Two additional judges on the Hawaii Supreme Court, Associate Justice Sabrina McKenna and Associate Justice Michael Wilson, also participated in the 2020 symposium, along with judges on other Hawaii courts and from different states.

In March, the Hawaii Supreme Court found in a separate case that citizens have a right to a “life-sustaining climate system.”

Wilson wrote in a concurring opinion that we are facing a “climate emergency” that puts the “lives of our children and future generations” at stake.

“[T]he history of these seminars, from their timing and origins to the widespread and extremely active participation by judges hearing these cases — which of course was the seminars’ entire objective — is something that it is difficult to conceive is actually happening in the U.S,” Schilling said.

Recktenwald, Sher Edling, ELI and the companies being sued by Honolulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

KATELYNN RICHARDSON

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Disappointing’: SCOTUS Won’t Hear Energy Companies’ Appeals To Climate Damage Lawsuits

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

REPORT: Prevalence of GSE Appraisal Waivers—March 2023

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This report tracks trends for GSE appraisal waivers monthly and provides data on the risk characteristics of these loans.

To download the most recent data, please click here.

To read our comment letter to FHFA on appraisal-related policies, practices, and processes, please click here.

PDF to most recent report

Slide deck on GSE Appraisal Waiver Report

AUTHORS

Edward J. Pinto

Senior Fellow and Director, AEI Housing Center.

Tobias Peter

Research Fellow and Assistant Director, AEI Housing Center

EDITORS NOTE: This AEI report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Biden Administration Issues Mass Release Policy; Florida District Court Stops It

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Just hours before the end of Title 42, the District Court for the Northern District of Florida issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) halting the implementation of the Biden Administration’s mass release policy issued by the Border Patrol only one day earlier.

The new policy, which the Border Patrol dubbed “parole with conditions,” authorized agents to release aliens who have illegally crossed the southern border through parole before they are given a Notice to Appear (NTA) in immigration court.  Issuing that NTA to illegal aliens is extremely important because it officially places them in deportation proceedings.  However, the new policy authorized border agents to parole illegal aliens and release them into the U.S. with only a promise that, within 60 days, the alien would self-report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office to receive an NTA, or use an online portal to request that ICE send them an NTA through the mail.

Through the new policy, the Administration was clearly seeking to bypass federal law that requires detention of illegal aliens arriving at the southern border and to bypass the restrictions set forth in the parole statute, which allows parole only to be given on a case-by-case basis.  Reports swirled that the Border Patrol simply planned to release illegal aliens on the streets of border communities when Border Patrol stations and NGO shelters were full.

Less than 24 hours after the Biden Administration issued the policy, the State of Florida sought to stop it.  On Thursday morning, Florida’s Attorney General filed a complaint in federal district court arguing that the new “parole with conditions” policy is not only contrary to federal law, but also violates that same Court’s decision vacating a similar parole policy issued by the Biden Administration.  Florida’s complaint asked the Court to declare the new policy unlawful and enjoin Homeland Security from enforcing or implementing it.

Federal Judge Wetherell agreed with Florida and issued the temporary restraining order.  Judge Wetherell indeed found that the Border Patrol’s new mass release policy, called “parole with conditions” was functionally indistinguishable from the Border Patrol’s prior “parole + alternatives to detention” policy, which the same District Court determined was issued in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  The District Court rejected the Biden Administration’s claim that the new policy was not subject to the APA due to the crisis and need for urgent action.  Instead, the Court pointed out that the Administration’s parole with conditions policy memo “does not explain how this surge was unexpected or why DHS waited until the day before the Title 42 Order was scheduled to end before issuing the new parole policy.”

Judge Wetherell ordered that the TRO would expire in 14 days and scheduled another hearing on May 19 to determine whether the TRO should be converted into a preliminary injunction.  Until any further action in court, the Biden Administration must now process illegal aliens entering through the southern border in accordance with existing statutes and regulations issued under Title 8 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The Biden Administration criticized Judge Wetherell’s decision to issue the TRO. “This is a harmful ruling that will result in unsafe overcrowding at CBP facilities and undercut our ability to efficiently process and remove migrants, and risks creating dangerous conditions for Border Patrol agents and migrants,” said a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statement released in response to the order.

AUTHOR

FAIR Staff

RELATED ARTICLES:

Now the Senate’s Turn to Act on H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act

Chicago Sends Migrants to Police Stations as City Scrambles to Find Space

New York City’s Sanctuary Status To Cost Taxpayers Billions

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EDITORS NOTE: This FAIR column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Threat Behind Biden’s Latest Lie About the ‘White Supremacist Terror Threat’

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Old Joe Biden gave the commencement address at Howard University on Saturday, and as he has done so many times during his presidency, he stoked the flames of racial hatred, resentment, division, and mutual suspicion. That’s par for the course for this conscience-free, senescent corruptocrat, but his words at Howard had an ominous edge that all Americans should not fail to discern.

Biden wasn’t just lying, as he always does. He was signaling the future plans of his regime.

Biden repeated his frequently repeated lie that Donald Trump had called Nazis “fine people,” and also said: “But on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to st- — to stand up for the best in us. To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat.  To stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did in my Inaugural Address — to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. And I’m not saying this because I’m at a black HBCU.  I say it wherever I go.”

What’s a “Black HBCU,” Joe? “HBCU” stands for “Historically black colleges and universities,” so our alleged president, who is sharp as a tack and not at all in the throes of advanced dementia, was saying that he was speaking at a “black historically black college and university.” This ridiculous phrase could be the result of Joe’s speechwriter making lazy use of the acronym, but it’s more likely that Biden was going off-script and saying something incoherent. Again.

Old Joe lied yet again when he said that he repeats the lie that white supremacists constitute the nation’s biggest terror threat everywhere he goes, but he has indeed said it before. And not just Biden, but also Gestapo chief Merrick Garland, and the FBI have told us so, and they wouldn’t lie to us, now, would they? In November 2021, FBI and Homeland Security Department officials increased investigations of “domestic extremists,” reiterating the claim that they are today’s foremost terror threat. Yet no matter how often Biden and his henchmen repeat this, actual white supremacist terrorists in any significant numbers have been conspicuously lacking.

Ever so conveniently for Biden, no sooner had he uttered this false claim again at Howard on Saturday than a couple of hundred actual white supremacist terrorists miraculously materialized in Washington. All were young, physically fit men; not a single fat Nazi in the bunch. All wore the same blue shirt and khaki pants uniform, all with their faces covered, and once again, the feds showed no curiosity about who they are and made no attempt to determine where they came from or where they went. This clumsy false-flag operation was widely exposed and ridiculed on Twitter, but conservative writer Chris Brunet pointed out: “What’s sad about this clip is that everyone here on my side of Twitter instantly knows this is a glowie/fed operation… pure theatre. But it is actually a really effective psyop, they keep doing it, because it works. Ask any normal person on the street, ask your mom, ask your sister, and they will be terrified of this clip and fall for it hook-line-and-sinker.”

The FBI has also been busy fashioning a white supremacist threat in other ways. Whistleblowers have revealed that Old Joe’s pure-as-the-driven-snow FBI has been hard at work pressuring agents to classify cases as “domestic violent extremism” (DVE) when they aren’t, and rewarding them when they do. That’s how you create a white supremacist terror threat.

This revelation came last year in a letter that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent to FBI top dog Christopher Wray. Jordan stated that “from recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification.” This was no surprise. This is, after all, the same FBI that investigated angry parents who protested at school board meetings against the imposition of the woke agenda in public schools.

That’s the threat that was contained in Old Joe’s words at Howard. Old Joe said it plainly last September in his ominous red and black speech: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” The parents at the school board meetings were just the beginning. This regime aims to criminalize political dissent, and that will require demonizing and stigmatizing fully half of the electorate. Before too long it will be clear that when Biden claims that white supremacists are the biggest terror threat the nation faces, he means ordinary Americans who have never broken any law but who oppose his agenda. If everyone who opposes him is a white supremacist terrorist, then the nation has over a hundred million of them. Arrests and prosecutions on false pretenses will follow. That’s the threat that was contained in his words at Howard.

AUTHOR

Robert Spencer

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

America Must Not Just Survive, She Must Thrive!

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“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” ― John F. Kennedy, remarks on the 20th Anniversary of Voice of America on February 26, 1962.

Sadly, today its Mourning in America.

President Donald J. Trump’s campaign released a new anti-Biden/pro-American ad titled “Mourning in America,” which pays homage to the iconic “Morning in America“ ad by President Ronald Reagan. The ad depicts the suffering felt by average Americans under President Joe Biden, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, ongoing inflation, an illegal alien surge at the southern border, transgender athletes competing in female sports and much more.

The new ad begins with these prophetic words, “It’s mourning again in America. And thanks to Joe Biden, our borders are now wide open for all to come. Why would we ever accept the incompetence and weakness of Biden when we could have the freedom, security, and economic prosperity we enjoyed just three years ago?”

WATCH: Mourning in America

Today America is Barely Surviving

Mark Twain wrote, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Today we have seen the native American criminal class expanded to include: the White House, first family, FBI, CIA, DOJ, DOD, DHS, and every other federal, state and local agency. From the school house to the White House we are witnessing an America where we the people have been, via public policy, put into the survival mode by the Nuevo Elected Criminal Class (NECC).

Today Americans can’t afford food, clothing, gasoline or a new car. Many can’t afford to buy a home in places like California and in the big metropolitan areas like Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, New York City and Detroit. Many newly graduated students find it difficult to rent an apartment to just live freely and pursue their chosen career and happiness. Today Americans are pursuing ways to survive until, hopefully, the NECC is drained from the swamp.

What is the swamp? It is a system of governance that wants power, absolute power.

In his dystopian novel 1984 George wrote, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

People are living in fear. Fear of losing their job because they used the wrong personal pronoun. Fear of speaking out on social media. Fear of being labeled a domestic terrorist for telling the truth. Fear of being white, straight, Christian, Jew and because they stand up for the American flag with their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to it. Patriots are now the enemy of the state.

Patriotic citizens fear their governments at every level from the local school boards to the halls of Congress, to the U.S. Supreme Court and finally to the White House.

We now live in a time when our government is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market. We now are ruled by a government that is afraid of its own people.

Americans are now not just barely surviving, and not thriving. Americans are now living in fear.

This is why there is “mourning” in America.

Make America Thrive Again

President John F. Kennedy said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

Since the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. there have been numerous persistent, persuasive and unrealistic myths that have led to and caused the decline in America’s prosperity and with it the ability of Americans to thrive.

These persistent, persuasive and unrealistic policies include:

  1. Mankind must control the climate in order to save the planet. This myth has lead to the Green New Deal and efforts to reduce the carbon, CO2, levels. This myth has lead to mandating the use of all electric vehicles, stopping efforts to drill for fossil fuels in America, importation of oil from foreign nations and even an attack on appliances such as stoves which use natural gas, a very clean form of energy. This myth has been totally debunked by a recent study titled World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-Fossil component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018) which stated, “Our results show that the percentage of the total CO2 due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.” This lead to our asking: How many U.S. Soldiers lives will be needlessly lost after our military converts to an all Electric Military Fleet of Land Vehicles (EVMLVs)?
  2. People can choose their gender. This myth was created by the LGBTQIE+ community to educate, encourage, promote and recruit underaged children to become partners for adult sodomites. This agenda has gone on warp speed since the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., who prides himself, no pun intended, on furthering the queering of every aspect of American life. Today using the wrong pronoun can get you fired, harassed, assaulted and even killed. Gender-Queer is becoming the new norm. Recently a ‘Gender Queer’  school counselor was arrested for grooming and assaulting a child. Zobella Brazil Vinik, a 29-year-old woman who identifies as trans reportedly groomed and molested a 15-year-old female student. Companies like Anheuser-Bush, Google, Disney Corporation have embraced sodomy, promoted sodomites and have lost billions of dollars doing so.
  3. All whites, and blacks who love white people, are racists. This myth began with the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam and now the Black Lives Matter movements. The Critical Race Theory (CRT) myth is promoted in our schools from Kindergarten to our colleges and universities. It, along with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, have lead to the myth that we should judge people by the color of their skins, not by the content of their characters. This has lead to convicted felons like George Floyd being idolized and statues of American leaders torn down, like Abraham Lincoln. Even the Department of Defense has fully embraced CRT and put into practice at every military academy, it is taught to new recruits and in various officers courses. Even military bases are being renamed to embrace the myths in CRT.
  4. Communism lead to Utopia Myth. This myth is the ongoing war against capitalism. It has not stopped despite the fall of the former Soviet Union. It is being embraced as a panacea when in fact it is a pariah. Communism kills. It kills families, cultures and eventually individuals by the tens of millions.
  5. Bigger government, more spending and taxation lead to equal outcomes myth. We now have Americans paying more taxes and the federal government spending more not to help we the people but rather to help other nation states and causes that are disturbingly anti-American. This has led to the largest national debt in U.S. history. It seems that neither pollical party has the will to stop the spending and reduce the debt on this and future generations.
  6. Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) myths. The policies driven by DIE are harming American workers and forcing companies to turn their attention away from serving their customers to complying with government ESG scores. DIE is now more important than equal protection under the law. DIE is a law unto itself that destroys the prosperity and ideal of America being a melting pot made up of all races, colors and creeds working toward making America a great and prosperous nation.

The above list is just the tip of the iceberg. We have not listed how non-profits, corporations, churches, synagogues, Mosques and many of the 20 political parties in the U.S. are harming our ability to thrive.

The 2024 presidential election takes on greater importance than any previous election. We as a nation will either continue down the narrow street to survival, or we get on the broader pathway back to prosperity and a thriving United States of America.

As JFK asked, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

Choose wisely. Your, your children and grandchildren’s futures depend on it.

©2023 Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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‘Cannot Control The Movement Of People’: Mayorkas Refuses To Say Whether Border Crisis Could Have Been Avoided

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Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas refused to say Friday whether the crisis on the border could have been prevented.

“We cannot control the movement of people before they reach our border,” Mayorkas told “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos. “Our responsibility attaches once they are in our custody.”

Mayorkas predicted during testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee at an April 18 hearing that there would be a surge of migrants after Title 42 expired. The Trump-era border policy expired Thursday at 11:59 p.m.

Mayorkas has claimed that the border is not open on multiple occasions, including during a Wednesday press conference where he ignored questions from Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter Jennie Taer.

WATCH:

Over 1.2 million illegal immigrants have been encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border during fiscal year 2023, according to data released by United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), following 2,378,944 encounters in fiscal year 2022 and 1,734,686 in fiscal year 2021, while Fox News reported that 600,000 migrants evaded CBP in fiscal year 2022.

The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained documents detailing the Biden administration’s plans to allow illegal immigrants to be released on “parole with conditions” without any means to track them or giving them court dates. U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell halted the Biden administration’s proposed “quick release” program Thursday, following a lawsuit by Republican officials in Florida.

Taer said during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax that word of mouth from migrants entering the United States was encouraging other illegal immigrants to come, despite Mayorkas’ statements to the public.

“Migrants are coming across, they’re getting released and they’re telling their families that are south of the border that that’s happening and that’s really the message, I think, that’s resonating with migrants,” Taer said.

AUTHOR

HAROLD HUTCHISON

Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘There’s a Remedy for Our Nation — and That Remedy Is Not Gun Control’: Congressman

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Waves of grief continue to break over Texas, as the tight-knit Allen community comes to grip with the weekend’s senseless shooting. As the names and pictures of Saturday’s victims were released by police, hearts across the country shattered at the news that two families had lost multiple loved ones. A six-year-old boy, orphaned by the death of his parents and brother, is all that remains of the Cho family. Other moms and dads reeled at the horror of losing two elementary-aged daughters as the Mendozas did. After Nashville, Louisville, and so many other devastating tragedies this spring, people are desperate for answers. When will it end — and what can we possibly do to stop it?

Congressman Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who had a front-row seat for the overwhelming sorrow that followed The Covenant School killings in March told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice that he stepped off the House floor after those murders and said, “This country needs a revival.” As a result, he pointed out, “I was mocked by the national media and across the country — and maybe across the globe, I don’t know. But I still stand by that.”

As usual, Hice said, the Left is “trying to blame the instruments of death.” “So they’re going after the guns. But as Christians,” he pointed out, “we know that evil exists in our world. We know that there’s a remedy for our nation — and that remedy is not going to be found simply in gun control. We’ve got to go to the heart of the issue, which is the heart of mankind — mankind which has turned away from the Lord.”

While Democrats like Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez blame Republicans — “We’re living in a Texas nightmare, and it’s a nightmare that [the GOP] created” — the reality, Hice insists, is that guns have been around “for hundreds of years.” “It’s just now that we’re seeing a change, a surge in violence. So it’s not the guns.”

Burchett agreed. “Well, it’s an easy scapegoat,” he pointed out. “… And it’s an election year coming up, [and] they have a weak candidate [in Joe Biden]. So [gun control is] what they’re going to go for. … [I]t’s symbolism. It’s what sells. And … these murders are just horrible.” But, he went on, “We lose 100 people a day in automobile accidents every 39 minutes. We lose somebody to a drunk driver. Yet nobody’s wanting to take alcohol or cars away from people. And so, to me it’s pretty telling about what’s going on.”

When Americans look at what happened in Brownsville, Texas on Sunday, “a man with murder in his heart [used] his vehicle to attack others,” Hice said. “[But] there are no cries to do away with SUVs, right?”

That’s because, as Bishop Charles Flowers said later, “You cannot legislate righteousness. Policies don’t change the heart of a person,” he insisted on “Washington Watch.” “But policies do set the environment in which either evil or righteousness flourish. And with respect to the right to bear arms, that is the responsibility that you and I have been given — not by men, but by God — to protect that which belongs to us.”

It’s important to remember, Flowers said, “The gun itself has never shot anybody.” It’s in someone’s hands. “And the person who has their hands on that weapon is either more or less likely to use it based on what kind of environment … that is around them.”

“Every lost life, of course, is a sad situation in any case,” he emphasized. “But it’s not the possession of guns that do[es] it. I believe in responsible gun ownership. [But if] you put the guns in the hands of somebody that … [will] aid them in their already twisted behavior, you don’t do that. That doesn’t make good sense. But at the same time, [you also don’t] pull that right and responsibility from everybody else who would rightfully use the weapons.”

As Hice mentioned, this is a “heart” problem, and that heart is molded by several so many factors. “We have this outcry to get rid of guns. Why is there no outcry to restore the family, to restore morality? Why this misguided blame for an issue that they’re trying to address with a Band-Aid rather than get to the heart of it?”

Flowers said the answer, at least from the Democrats’ perspective, is simple. “Gun control is part of a larger agenda, and that agenda is to disarm the citizens so that another power can come in and massively control the citizenship. A broken family assists that agenda, so they can’t tout the strength of a strengthening family, because it is counterproductive to what the end goal is.”

But there is hope, he insists, and it starts with prayer and action. “Pray, he says in Second Chronicles: ‘If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek his face and turn from their wicked ways …’ Turning is a prerequisite,” Flowers pointed out. “… ‘Then will I hear from heaven. I’ll forgive their sins, and I’ll heal their land.’ Secondly, don’t let passivity gulf you up like the vicious monster that it is. We have to begin to act — and act out our morals in the social environment.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©2023 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Interior Secretary: ‘The Monstrous Administrative State Killing Self-Government Must Be Stopped’

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News sites like Geller Report have warned of the subversive take-over from within in our most powerful government agencies.

Trump Interior Secretary: The Monstrous Administrative State Killing Self-Government Must Be Stopped

David Bernhardt has written a screed against the burgeoning administrative state built on his firsthand experience as a Beltway insider.

By: Tristan Justice, The Federalist. May 8, 2023:

A new book out Tuesday lifts the curtain on what the modern administrative state has become: a bureaucratic leviathan undermining representative systems of government — and it needs to be reined in.

After a long career in civil service that includes stints under the last two Republican presidents, former Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has written a screed against the burgeoning administrative state from his firsthand experience as a Beltway insider. The book, titled You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State, is both an expose of the swamp-style tactics leveraged to stifle the agenda of democratically elected leaders and a guide to confront the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy.

In a Monday interview with The Federalist, Bernhardt pointed to the “lionization” of “the resistance” within federal agencies following the triumphant 2016 election of President Donald Trump as an inflection point in the administrative state subverting the will of American voters.

“My concern over time is that if you have 2.2 million people in the civil service, and 1 percent of them is actively resisting,” Bernhardt said, “that’s one thing.” He continued:

But if it’s 10 percent of them, it’s a different thing. If it’s 20 percent of them, it’s something else. And if it’s more than that, what does that mean for representative democracy and government? Because at the end of the day, in my mind the entire point of us having an election system is so that the American people can express a view and have it mean something.

While primarily drawn from his time at the Department of the Interior, the book examines how employees across federal agencies have learned to manipulate bureaucratic processes to hamper White House priorities that run counter to their ideologies. From turning in products rendered unusable to outright delaying the completion of projects deemed important by the elected administration, employees exploit protections as federal bureaucrats to “resist” presidential directives.

In one chapter, Bernhardt pulls extensively from a report by the America First Policy Institute, where he serves as chairman of the Center for American Freedom, titled, “Tales from the Swamp.” The 2021 paper documents episodes of resistance throughout the four years of the Trump administration.

A plurality of examples Bernhardt cites involve the Department of Justice, the same agency that sought to frame Trump and his 2016 campaign as engaged in Russian collusion. The FBI investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane culminated in the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who ultimately exonerated the president. Bernhardt made no reference to the Russia-collusion hoax but shed light on a litany of other abuses by DOJ officials who successfully subverted the will of voters by thwarting White House initiatives. The cross-agency examples illustrate the extent to which unelected ideologues are able to hijack democracy to substitute presidential policy with their own agendas.

Axios published a report last summer that unveiled Trump’s plans for a complete overhaul of the entire federal bureaucracy in a potential second term, starting with the Department of Justice. Bernhardt’s book offers not just a warrant but a mandate for bureaucratic reform to be a top priority for the next Republican president.

“The election involves the change of, let’s say, 3,500 people,” Bernhardt told The Federalist. “There’s 2.2 million that don’t change, and you have to figure out, ‘How am I going to have these folks help me drive change forward?’”

Trump, he added, “started very late,” with “Schedule F” for federal employees not proposed until the last year of his administration.

The delay not only gave the president’s antagonists years of experience in hampering administrative priorities but also gave former Trump officials a lesson in urgency. Last week, the Heritage Foundation announced the hiring of former White House Personnel Director John McEntee to preemptively staff the next administration. Bernhardt wrote about the importance of administrative staff moving on the president’s agenda from day one.

“A presidential term is 1,461 days,” Bernhardt reported. “In the absence of a second term, everything that is not accomplished by day 1,461 is probably never going to be done.”

In his interview with The Federalist, Bernhardt finished with a warning for the next administration. “The resistance to the next Republican president’s policies will be 10 times worse from the standpoint of the career civil service, the [nongovernmental organizations], and the radical left,” Bernhardt said.

The prophetic note makes Bernhardt’s book a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the true scale of the administrative state, especially for those hoping for a political appointment.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Death with Dignity’ — Ha!

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The Left loves its phony narratives and I’ve taken aim at several of them.  Today I take aim at ‘death with dignity’, the phony narrative the Left uses to sell assisted suicide and euthanasia.

I start with the spectacular story out of the Netherlands in 2019 where a court upheld the actions of a doctor who euthanized a woman with dementia against her wishes.  The doctor put sedatives in the woman’s coffee and had the family hold her down for the lethal injection.  The woman put up a fight.  Doesn’t sound like a very dignified death to me.

And it wasn’t very dignified what happened to the brother of a friend of mine.  The brother had his third stroke and was sedated.  His wife violated his written instructions by stopping all treatment and withdrawing all food and water.  The wife was heard to say she was tired of dealing with the situation and it’s also true the sooner he died, the more she stood to inherit.   A financial motive – how dignified is that?

To these two ugly stories, we can now add a third.  A palliative care nurse recently published the story you are about to hear so “eyes will be opened to the horrifying reality of euthanasia”:

  • They say euthanasia is a compassionate, dignified way to die. They say everyone should have the option, and that a life with suffering is not a life worth living. But that’s not what I’ve seen. I know Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) to be messier and more distressing than anyone cares to talk about.
  • Laura had picked out music to play in the background while she died, and had chosen which loved ones she wanted by her side. It was planned for 6 pm. She was alert and oriented, and had signed a waiver saying that if for whatever reason she was no longer judged to be of sound mind at the time of the MAID provision, she could be euthanized anyways. She thought she had complete control. Just a few hours before 6 pm Laura had a completely unexpected grand mal seizure. She wouldn’t stop seizing and required large doses of a sedating anticonvulsant. The time of the provision came, and she was confused and groggy from the sedating medication, and unable to properly confirm she wanted the euthanasia, or say goodbye to her family members. She tried to speak but no one could understand what she was saying. Laura was euthanized at 6 pm, according to the waiver she had signed. This was what she had requested, but the family came out of her room shaking, with eyes wide. They cried, and kept saying it should have never happened that way. They had no closure. There was no dignified, peaceful ending. Just their loved one, killed in the middle of trying to say something…. (H)er death was sudden, and traumatic, and the family went home right after without anyone to support them through the process…. (A) coworker sped out of the room shaking and crying,
  • I know multiple other nurses who have been through the same experience. Although they had no religious or moral objections to MAID, after witnessing it first hand they swore to never be in the room again while it happened. They were deeply unsettled, and their conscience told them what they couldn’t admit to themselves: the intentional ending of a life is wrong, no matter the circumstances.
  • Patients may think that choosing MAID relieves their family of the burden of waiting for their death, or seeing suffering. But in reality it steals time and closure, and replaces a natural process with an unsettling ending. From what I have seen, loved ones of euthanized patients appear to struggle more in their grief than loved ones of patients who die naturally.

Welcome to the wacky world of the Left, where ‘death with dignity’ means people being killed against their wishes, for unsavory motives like money.  Where the vendors selling assisted suicide are not killers.  Where the real cause of death – assisted suicide – is kept off death certificates.  Where death is considered ‘medical treatment‘ and medicine means a ‘substance to cause death’.   Where doctors push assisted suicide on vulnerable patients, elder abuse is common, agonizing deaths routinely occur from lethal drugs that don’t work as advertised, destructive social contagion takes over, and people are taught all of this is good when it could not be more evil.

If this is ‘death with dignity’, you can keep it.

©2023 Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

Gavin Newsom’s Carbon-Neutral Grid Plan Looks To Be Going The Way Of The Bullet Train To Nowhere

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California’s planned transition to a carbon-neutral electricity grid by 2045 relies heavily on offshore wind power. It might take a miracle to get there. The growth of offshore wind will have to accelerate faster than a Tesla Model S, which goes from zero to 60 in less than two seconds.

As of 2023, there is no offshore wind in California. But, as the Los Angeles Times reports, “state and local governments are banking on offshore wind to help reach their renewable energy goals.” CalMatters environment reporter Nadia Lopez says “California is betting on giant wind farms in the ocean to strengthen the grid and meet [the state’s] renewable energy goals.”

The potential is there. So are the hurdles.

“The California coast is home to some of the best offshore wind resources in the country,” says the energy and environmental blog of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates there is the potential to generate 201,000 megawatts of power off the coast. Plans call for the state to harness from 2,000 to 5,000 megawatts of it by 2030, then 25,000 megawatts (25 gigawatts) by 2045, generating enough electricity for 25 million homes. (There are currently about 14.5 million housing units in California, according to the Census Bureau).

But this is California, where building anything, in particular massive public works projects — say, a bullet train — is a task that is grueling, protracted and in some instances impossible.

The most stubborn barrier to overcome — and who could have guessed this? — will be cost. MIT Technology Review says California’s “audacious plans” run up against “a daunting geological challenge.” Just a few miles off the coast, the continental shelf drops sharply. This “makes it prohibitively expensive to erect standard offshore wind turbines which are set atop fixed structures that extend to the seafloor.” Turbines located near Morro Bay, where the water is 4,300 feet deep, will have to be built on floating platforms. But these floating turbines are not only “speculative,” says MIT, the technology behind them is also “very costly.” As of now, there are only a handful of floating offshore wind platforms in the world and the combined output of these demonstration projects, 123 megawatts, is meaningless on a global scale.

The University of California Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy says that nearly 24 of the 25 gigawatts of planned offshore electricity will be produced from windmills floating on platforms.

This of course will cause costs to rise to unaffordable levels. At $1.04 per megawatt hour, offshore wind has the most expensive “levelized cost of electricity and levelized cost of storage for new resources entering service in 2027,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Battery storage is next at 64 cents per megawatt hour. All dispatchable sources are far cheaper, including nuclear, which would cost 61 cents per megawatt hour.

There are also logistical detours and roadblocks ahead. Adam Stern, executive director of Offshore Wind California, an industry group, says to expect the planning and regulatory process to drag out (our words, not his) for five to six years.

The same eco-warriors who have pressured the state to close natural gas and nuclear plants, and wield almost unlimited political clout in Sacramento and Washington, will find environmental hazards to justify their opposition to offshore wind. Fishermen will protest the negative impacts on their livelihoods, and engineering, material and cost challenges associated with the underwater cables needed to anchor floating turbines and move the power they generate are bound to emerge.

And should the state decide to locate turbines nearer to shore to avoid the high cost of floating platforms, there will be opposition from rich coastal elites who don’t want their views by the spinning monsters.

What’s more, offshore wind is vulnerable to tsunamis, the threat of which is “high to very high” on the West Coast.

We are in the fourth month of 2023, not 22 years from the state’s 2045 deadline, and not a single offshore wind project has been started. It’s unlikely we will see even a glimpse of progress for years, maybe not even in this decade. Despite the obvious obstacles ahead, there’s been no talk of revisiting a surely impossible target date, no sense of uneasiness in Sacramento, just an Admiral Farragut “damn the torpedoes” mindset that has the potential to sink California.

AUTHOR

KERRY JACKSON

Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

RELATED ARTICLE: JASON ISAAC: The Great Carbon Capture Scam

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ANOTHER BANK FAILURE: PacWest Shares Plunge, Troubled Bank Crashes

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$640 billion in bank failures. Another Biden success. PacWest stock plummets more than 50%, other bank stocks join in decline.

PacWest Tumbles; Oil Steadies

…..following Federal Reserve interest-rate increase

By: Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2023:

Aftershocks from March’s banking turmoil rumbled on, even as the the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-rise campaign approaches its end.

In recent market action:

PacWest’s already battered shares fell by 45% in premarket trading. The bank said it was talking to potential partners and investors, and would keep evaluating “all options to maximize shareholder value.”

A raft of other regional lenders fell in sympathy before the opening bell: Western Alliance Bancorp slid 23%, while Comerica and Zions Bancorp fell by 9% and 10%, respectively. First Horizon sank nearly in half after its $13.4 billion sale to Toronto’s TD Bank was called off.

Read more.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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BIDEN’S ECONOMY: Silicon Valley Bank COLLAPSES Following Run on Bank, 2nd Biggest Bank Failure In United States History

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The SCOTUS Case To Watch—Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo

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This could be good news for reducing the unfettered power of the Administrative State.

SCOTUS Grants Review of Case That Will Gut the Federal Bureaucracy

By Bonchie | May 01, 2023

In the biggest news to come out of the Supreme Court of the United States since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Court has granted a review of Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo. In its deliberations, the court will deal with the question of whether to overrule the infamous Chevron Doctrine, a ’70s-era precedent that granted broad powers to the bureaucratic state to interpret vague, often narrow statutes with near zero accountability.

Here’s a quick explainer on the Chevron Doctrine via Cornell Law School.

One of the most important principles in administrative law, the “Chevron deference” was coined after a landmark case,Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 468 U.S. 837 (1984). The Chevron deference is referring to the doctrine of judicial deference given to administrative actions. In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court should defer to the agency’s answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference is appropriate where the agency’s answer was not unreasonable, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.

Read more.

©2023 Royal A. Brown III. All rights reserved.

Who coined the term ‘Deep State’? And what does this term mean today?

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To answer the question: “Who coined the term ‘Deep State’?”

We need to understand: What is the deep state?

To answer the question: “Who are the people in the deep state?”

We need to know what does this term mean in the year 2023 and exactly who’s behind it?

The Turkish phrase derin devlet which translates into “deep state” was created in the early part of the 20th century. Derin devlet is a “secret government” buried deeply within the visible government?

Curiously, it was candidate Donald J. Trump who borrowed from Turkish history. Donald J. Trump spoke of a “Deep State” embedded deeply within the government bureaucracy – and centered in the Department of Justice – which actively worked to defeat him in 2016 and then sought to undermine him once he won the presidency.

Who coined the term ‘Deep State’?

In his book Last Rites for a ‘Pure Bandit’: Clandestine Service, Historiography and the Origins of the Turkish ‘Deep State’ published in 2010 Ryan Gingeras wrote the term “Deep State”,

[G]enerally refers to a kind of shadow or parallel system of government in which unofficial or publicly unacknowledged individuals play important roles in defining and implementing state policy.”

On April 10th, 2017 in a Daily JSTOR article Matthew Wills wrote,

This concept of a deep state, Gingeras continues, is used to “explain why and how agents employed by the state execute policies that directly contravene the letter and spirit of the law.” Breaking the law, of course, often means employing criminals. Gingeras, a specialist in organized crime in Turkey, looks at the underbelly of the Turkish deep state to examine how alliances between generals, statesmen and “narcotic traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists, and other criminals” are formed. 

[ … ]

Essentially, dirty work needs dirty workers: so a clandestine force was recruited from paramilitary and criminal elements during the chaotic years of the first quarter century of the [20th] century.

Read full article.

Who are the people in the Deep State today?

Today we have federal agents, the DoJ, FBI, DoD generals, statesmen and women from all parties, narcotics traffickers, paramilitaries, terrorists and other criminals that are part of the “Nuevo Deep State”.

These “Nuevo Deep Staters” include:

  • Eco-terrorists, elected officials, the Department of Energy, NASA, corporations and non-profits who are pushing the Green New Deal.
  • Social justice organizations, including educators K-20, media, social media, corporations, government officials, generals, that promote an “anti-white” narrative using the mythical Critical Race Theory and racist the New York Time’s 1619 Project.
  • The LGBTQIE+ radicals who using the diversity, inclusion and equity myths to further the chemical and physical castration of American underaged children.
  • Public school teachers, school board members, superintendents who promote the LGBTQIE+ radical ideology by teaching it to American children, especially young and impressionable children.
  • Public school librarians and public school media specialists who insist on have pornography on their book shelved that depict graphic sexual acts between children and between children and adults.
  • Organizations such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter who are paramilitary organizations that have caused extensive chaos, burned down entire communities, attacked their opponents and either attempted or actually murdered those who they deemed a threat to the deep state.
  • Nation states such as China, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Cuba et. al. who are dedicated to supporting the deep states efforts to destabilize the American Constitutional Republic and replace it with a one-party system. Some of these nation states interfered in every election since 2016.
  • Global governance organizations including the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Health Organization and others involved in the “Great Reset”.

The Bottom Line

The Nuevo Deep State’s mission is gaining and keep power. It is designed to undermine Judeo-Christian based religions, the individual, the traditional family and the American republic.

Without this the Deep State understands that it will go the way of the former Soviet Union. The Deep State have added new words to the political lexicon like “woke”. It is taking away words like male, female, white, children, boy, girl and replacing them with hundreds or categories of genders and words like homophobic, racist, Islamophobic and fascist.

For the Deep state to win good men and women must do nothing to stop it. They must look the other way while the Deep States takes away more and more of their liberties.

Good men and women must look the other way when their children are taught that they aren’t little boys and little girls anymore. Good men and women must look the other way when their neighbors and friends are imprisoned for attending a peaceful rally or supporting a particular political ideology.

Good men and women must submit.

The Nuevo Deep State demands it.

Today, the Nuevo Deep State stretches from the school house to the White House.

As George Orwell warned in his book “1984″,

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The Deep State continues to attack President Donald J. Trump, but you see the Deep State isn’t after him. It is really after we the people.

You see we are the Winston Smith’s of today.

Thus ends the lesson on the Orwellian Nuevo Deep State.

©2023 Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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The Government’s Sprawling Effort to Censor [True] Information During the Pandemic

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In July 2022, Twitter permanently suspended Rhode Island physician Andrew Bostom after awarding the epidemiologist and longtime researcher at Brown University a fifth strike for spreading “misinformation.”

A July 26 tweet alleging that there was no solid evidence Covid-19 vaccines had prevented any children from being hospitalized—”only RCT data we have from children reveals ZERO hospitalizations prevented by vaccination vs. placebo”—was apparently the final straw.

The funny thing was, it appeared Bostom’s tweet was true.

Dr. Anish Koka, a cardiologist and writer, said he was initially skeptical of Bostom’s claim. But after speaking with him for more than an hour, he realized Bostom was citing the government’s own data, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) briefing document that included randomized controlled trial (RCT) data on children.

“…Dr. Bostom’s tweet appears quite correct as per the FDA documents,” Koka wrote on Substack. “In the RCTs available, there does not appear to be evidence that the vaccine prevented hospitalizations.”

Bostom’s permanent suspension was one of many anecdotes shared by journalist David Zweig in a December Twitter Files thread viewed by more than 64 million people, which exposed how the government worked with Twitter to try to “rig the Covid debate.”

It turns out this was not the only one of Bostom’s tweets that was true but was nevertheless flagged for “misinformation.”

“A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid,” Zweig notes. “The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.”

In other words, all five of Bostom’s tweets that had been flagged as “misinformation” were legitimate. At the very least, four-out-of-five were, and that’s according to Twitter’s own internal audit.

How this happened was partially explored by Zweig, who explained Twitter’s convoluted censorship process, which relied heavily on bots, contractors in foreign countries who lacked the expertise to make informed decisions, and Twitter brass who carried their own biases and incentives. This structure led to a predictable result.

“In my review of internal files,” writes Zweig, “I found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”

The CDC had effectively become the arbiter of truth.

This is alarming for at least two reasons. First, for anyone familiar with the government’s track record on truth, there’s reason to be skeptical of putting any government agency in charge of deciding what is true and false. Second, the CDC has been, to put it kindly, fallible throughout the pandemic. Indeed, the agency has been plagued with so much dysfunction and made so many crucial mistakes that its own director announced less than a year ago the organization needed an overhaul.

So there’s some reason to believe that Bostom and people like him—including epidemiologists like Dr. Martin Kuldorff (formerly of Harvard) and mRNA vaccine creator Dr. Robert Malone—were being suspended, banned, and de-amplified simply because Twitter was poorly situated to determine what was true and what was false.

There’s reason to doubt this claim, however.

Months after Zweig published his report on the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published a separate deep dive exploring the Virality Project, an initiative launched by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

The project, which Taibbi described as “a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs,” is noteworthy because officials made it clear that a goal was not just to flag false information, but information that was true but inconvenient to the government’s goals. Reports of “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway,” “worrisome jokes,” and “natural immunity” were all characterized as “potential violations,” as were conversations “interpreted to suggest that coronavirus might have leaked from a lab.”

In what Taibbi describes as “a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content,” the Virality Project began analyzing millions of posts each day from platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Medium, TikTok, and other social media sites, which were submitted through the JIRA ticketing system. On February 22, 2021, in a video no longer public, Stanford welcomed social media leaders to the group and offered instruction on how to join the JIRA system.

In contrast to Twitter’s previous internal guidance, which required narratives on Covid-19 to be “demonstrably false” before any censorship actions were taken, the Virality Project made it clear that information that was true was also fair game if it undermined the larger aims of the government and the Virality Project.

Specifically noted were “true stories that could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy,” personal testimonials about adverse side effects of vaccination, concerns over vaccine passports, and actual deaths of people following vaccination, such as Drene Keyes.

As NBC noted in 2021, Keyes, a 58-year-old black woman, died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine in February 2021. Described as an “elderly Black woman” by the Virality Project, Keyes’s death became a “disinformation” event after it garnered attention from “anti vax groups”—even though no one denied that she died within hours of taking the vaccine.

No autopsy was conducted on Keyes and there’s no way of knowing if the vaccine caused her death. But merely raising the possibility could have resulted in a ban. Officials at the Virality Project warned platforms that “just asking questions”—at least the wrong questions—was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”

Ironically, Taibbi notes, the Virality Project itself was often “extravagantly wrong” about Covid science, describing breakthrough events as “extremely rare events” (a fact it later conceded was wrong) and implying that natural immunity did not offer protection from Covid.

“Even in its final report, [the Virality Project] claimed it was misinformation to suggest the vaccine does not prevent transmission, or that governments are planning to introduce vaccine passports,” Taibbi writes. “Both things turned out to be true.”

‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’

It’s clear that the Virality Project’s primary purpose was not to protect Americans from misinformation. Its goal, as Taibbi notes, was to get the public to submit to authority and accept the state’s Covid narrative, particularly the pronouncements of public figures such as Drs. Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky.

The official policy can be summed up in the immortal words of Colonel Nathan Jessup, the villain portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Aaron Sorkin’s popular 1992 film A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.”

It’s important to understand that public officials, just like Col. Jessup, genuinely believe this. Jessup utters these words in anger in a wonderful monologue, after he is baited by Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) into telling the court how he really feels. Similarly, the Twitter Files reveal a program designed to control information—even true information—because it serves the state’s plan.

The last word—plan—is important, because it calls to mind Ludwig von Mises’s warning about those seeking to plan society.

“The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans,” Mises wrote. “He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.”

‘Sometimes They Are Five’

Mises’ words apply perfectly to the Virality Project, a program designed specifically to get people to submit to the government’s narrative and objectives, not their own. The preeminence of the plan is so important that it requires censoring information and targeting individuals—as the Virality Project did—even if it’s true.

It’s difficult to overstate how Orwellian this is.

In Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, the protagonist of the story, says, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four.”

Absent any context, the quote doesn’t make much sense. But it’s important to understand that Orwell saw statism and politics as forces destructive to the truth. His own brushes with state propaganda during the Spanish Civil War left him terrified that objective truth was “fading out of the world,” and he saw the state as inherently prone to obfuscation and euphemism (regardless of party).

“Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Within the context of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the meaning of Winston Smith’s words becomes crystal clear. Saying “two plus two makes four” might be an objective truth, but sometimes objective truth runs counter to Big Brother’s plan. Winston Smith is a slow learner, state agents tell him, because he can’t seem to grasp this simple reality.

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.”

Many people who lived through the Covid-19 pandemic likely can identify with the terror of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Orwell’s fear that objective truth is “fading out of the world.” We witnessed public officials say things that were demonstrably false and face no consequences, while Andrew Bostom and countless others were exiled from public discourse because they said things that were true, but ran counter to the state’s narrative.

Fortunately, in large part because of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, we now know how this happened.

“Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging,” Taibbi writes.

All of it was designed to control information. And in doing so, the state—which actually attempted to create a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which critics promptly dubbed a Ministry of Truth—created an environment hostile to free speech and truth.

Ironically, despite the egregious abuse delivered upon the truth over the last three years in the name of fighting “misinformation,” polls show roughly half of Americans believe social media companies should be censoring such material from their sites. Few seem to realize this will almost certainly involve those with influence and power—especially the government—deciding who and what are censored.

This is a recipe for disaster. History shows there’s no greater purveyor of falsehood and propaganda than the government itself. The Twitter Files are a reminder of that.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.) His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.