What’s Going On:

BUSTED: Secret Meetings Between Biden Officials and George Soros

According to a Fox News report, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has been exposed for scrubbing any mention of secret meetings with Hillary Clinton and George Soros from the public version of his calendar.

Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Obama administration official, was appointed by President Joe Biden as the SEC chief in April 2021. Gensler was the chief financial officer for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

So what is he trying to hide?

According to a Fox News Digital review:

Gensler’s public calendar showed that he only had a staff meeting on Aug. 7, 2021. Meanwhile, his private calendar lists a meeting with Clinton. On Aug. 20, 2021, his public calendar listed a meeting with Soros, but the meeting’s agenda is hidden. His private calendar mentions one agenda item: to discuss his forthcoming Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Gensler’s private calendar revealing the discrepancies was obtained by the watchdog group Energy Policy Advocates and shared with Fox News Digital. The group finally filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the SEC to get those records.

In recent days, when Fox News Digital contacted the SEC, the agency updated Gensler’s public calendar to include his meeting with Clinton in August 2021. However, as recently as Wednesday, the public calendar didn’t include the meeting. Archived copies of the webpage from April also list just a meeting with staff.

According to Fox News, an SEC spokesperson was questioned about this discrepancy. He replied that the agency occasionally updates its calendars “when it discovers something is missing or inaccurate.”

Additionally, archived copies of Gensler’s public calendar revealed other omissions regarding secret meetings. Examples include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Washington, D.C. consultant Minyon Moore, a former White House official. The SEC has since updated the calendar to include these meetings.

 

Dem Senator Announcement Boost for Republicans

Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow is retiring from office after representing Michigan in the Senate for over 20 years.

“Inspired by a new generation of leaders, I have decided to pass the torch in the U.S. Senate. I am announcing today that I will not seek re-election and will leave the U.S. Senate at the end of my term on January 3, 2025,” Stabenow announced Thursday.

The news is a blow to Democrats, who hold a razor-thin advantage in the Senate due to three Independents that regularly caucus with their party: Angus King (ME), Bernie Sanders (VT), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). The Republicans currently hold 49 seats.

The announcement also threatens Democrats’ chances of keeping their Senate majority in 2025 due in part to a challenging Senate map this cycle. They now have to defend 23 Senate seats in the next election — including the Independent seats held by Sinema, Sanders, and King.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also faces two possible retirements in red-leaning states: Jon Tester (MT) and Joe Manchin (WV). In addition, Senate Republicans only need to defend 10 seats in 2024, and the incumbents are not particularly vulnerable.

Their loss is our win and a win for America. Stay tuned as the story progresses.

Trump’s Announcement: Everything You Need to Know

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has pledged to ensure free speech online and plans to ban censorship of lawful online speech.

Here’s a summary of the plan, followed by the whole speech:

  • Sign an executive order that bans any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede lawful speech
  • Ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis/disinformation
  • Begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly
  • Order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in online censorship and prosecute all crimes identified
  • Call to action for House Republicans to immediately send an order against destroying evidence of censorship to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant
  • Upon inauguration, ask Congress to send a bill stating digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination
  • Immediately stop federal funding to non-profits and academic programs that are discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past
  • Enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities
  • Require seven years before any former federal employee is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of US user data to confront the problem of infiltration of former deep-staters and intelligence officials in major platforms
  • Require users of big online platforms should be informed when they have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow-banned, or otherwise restricted no matter what name they use and have the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal
  • All users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation and receive an un-manipulated stream of information if they’d like

On Wednesday, December 14th, Trump announced on Truth Social that a huge announcement would be made on Thursday. As the news spread, many users on multiple social media platforms, including Twitter, anxiously awaited his next post. Many expected an official announcement on his choice for vice president. Some even guessed he would choose Elon Musk as his runner-up. Others hoped for his return to Twitter.

Trump’s first announcement premiering his own brand of NFTs (non-fundable tokens), the Donald Trump Digital Card Collection, disappointed many users, including some Trump supporters. However, the illuminating graphics depicting Trump with superpowers served their purpose as attention-grabbing artwork.

Just two hours after his initial post went viral and became social media buzz, Trump released his pledge to combat the censorship of lawful speech.”

“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple. Just like dominoes, one by one, they’ll go down. That’s why today I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans. And reclaim is a very important word in this case because they’ve taken it away.

In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately. And here’s my plan.

First, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding from any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens.

I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis-or-dis information, and I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health, Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ. No matter who they are.

Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violation of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws that highjacked and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses.

To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters. We have to do this right now to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.

Third, upon my inauguration as president, I will ask congress to send a bill on my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business. From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.

Fourth, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis– and disinformation. The federal government should immediately stop funding non-profits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any US University is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal or blacklisting, those Universities should lose federal research dollars and federal loan support for a period of five years and maybe more.

We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote, and once you lose those elections and cone you use your borders like we have, you no longer have a country.

Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former deep-staters and intelligence officials, there should be a seven-year calling-off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOJ is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of US user data.

Fifth, the time has come for Congress to pass a digital bill of rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter. Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow-banned, or otherwise restricted no matter what name they used, they should be informed that it is happening, the right to a specific explanation to the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal.

In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely and receive an un-manipulated stream of information if they so choose. The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America and for the survival of western civilization itself.

When I’m president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left. By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation.

Thank you, and God bless America.”

@realDonaldTrump, Truth Social

Questions Swirl as Paul Pelosi is Spotted at an Event With Hunter Biden

On Sunday evening, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, attended the Kennedy Center Honors alongside Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family. This is the first time Paul Pelosi has been seen after his alleged hammer attack by a halfnaked man.

Naturally, questions swirled online in response. One Twitter user commented: “Paul Pelosi just got a standing ovation at the Kennedy Center awards. He recovered very quickly for an 82-year-old man who took a hammer to the head. How is this possible?”

“For someone who was nearly beaten to death with a hammer while police watched, elderly Paul Pelosi has made a near-miraculous and speedy full recovery!” said Todd Starnes.

One Twitter user pointed out that Paul Pelosi had a glove on one of his hands. “Mostly Peaceful Memes,” asked, “Have there been any photos of Paul Pelosi’s injuries?”

That would be worth looking into.

FBI and CIA Connections to Twitter Exposed

Former FBI and CIA operatives have been exposed as central figures in the Twitter Files‘ recent revelations. They confirm that the social media platform engaged in a sweeping censorship and election interference operation.

Ngo wrote: “Exclusive: Bari doesn’t name too many names but the head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team when secret actions were taken to stifle conservative accounts happened under Jeff Carlton, who worked for both CIA & FBI. He just deleted his LinkedIn, but I have an archive. @elonmusk”

A Trust & Safety leader from Twitter named Ella Irwin chimed in to attempt to correct the record. “This is actually false. I would recommend checking information like this before posting. Jeff stepped into this role as part of Twitter 2.0.”

However, Jeff Carlton’s archived LinkedIn profile shows that he was on the Strategic Response Team, albeit in a different role before November 2022. (Carlton appears to have been promoted.)

He was a Senior Program Manager from May 2021 to November 2022. The profile says he “built and led a programs team that optimizes intake, new workflow integration, training and quality, systems and tooling, and knowledge management for Twitter’s Strategic Response Team.”

In November 2022, he switched to a Senior Manager, where he now “leads Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees/agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalations. Manage crises and non-standard incidents in content moderation and customer support to promote ‘healthy public conversations.’”

The now-scrubbed archived LinkedIn page details Jeff Carlton’s experience in the intelligence community, including his assignments working with the FBI and CIA.

“Former Intelligence Officer transitioned to managing high-profile content moderation and customer support escalations in Social Media / Trust & Safety. Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team. U.S. Naval Academy graduate with 14 years in the Marine Corps leading XFN intelligence teams in data analysis, strategy development, and operational planning.”

The profile continues, “Team-builder and problem-solver in dynamic, high-pressure, resource-scarce environments from the Southern Philippines to Iraq to the Korean Peninsula. Proven manager of managers. Expert communicator whose briefings and writings drove Cabinet and White House-level decision-making during special assignments to the CIA and FBI. Innovative and technically savvy in integrating dozens of complex hardware and software solutions into operations.”

Ngo and Irwin continued to debate Carlton’s role with Twitter. Still, she did not directly dispute the central point about his intelligence background.

Ngo asked, “Do you have a connection to ex-CIA & FBI intelligence operative Jeff Carlton or Twitter? The LinkedIn profile he has tried to scrub says he’s been doing work for Twitter’s Strategic Response Team since May 2021. Oh. Yes, you do.” He provided a LinkedIn snapshot.

Ngo continued to lay out Carlton’s background and the relevance to the latest Twitter Files developments. “Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team, Jeff Carlton, who worked for CIA & FBI, deleted his LinkedIn quickly in response to #TwitterFiles. Before deleting, he changed his name to an alias to make him harder to find. But I have an archive:” He continued:

“‘[Jeff Carlton] worked for both the CIA & FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama.’ The ex-intelligence operative who was part of the Twitter team behind secret efforts to stifle conservatives,” he added.

Ngo then linked to a ZeroHedge article that shows that Twitter went on a hiring spree for spooks and Fed operatives as of the summer of 2022.

“For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter,” the article points out. “The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.”

Jim Baker, recently fired by Elon Musk abruptly after the initial Twitter Files release, which appeared to be scrubbed of references to the FBI’s activities, was also a key figure in the Russiagate scandal.

“Meanwhile, Mark Jaroszewski ended his 21-year posting as a supervisory special agent in the Bay Area to take up a position at Twitter, rising to become director of corporate security and risk,” the post continues. “And Douglas Turner spent 14 years as a senior special agent and SWAT Team leader before being recruited to serve in Twitter’s corporate and executive security services. Previously, Turner had also spent seven years as a secret service special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.”

“When asked to comment by MintPress, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said that she was ‘not surprised at all’ to see FBI agents now working for the very tech companies the agency policies, stating that there now exists a ‘revolving door’ between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate,” the article notes. “This created a serious conflict of interests in her mind, as many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs. “The truth is that at the FBI, 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement.”

“Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter,” the article adds. “For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at Twitter. Patrick G., a 23-year FBI supervisory special agent, is now head of corporate security. And Twitter’s director of insider risk and security investigations, Bruce A., was headhunted from his role as a supervisory special agent at the bureau. His resumé notes that at the FBI, he held ‘various intelligence and law enforcement roles in the US, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East and was a ‘human intelligence and regional counterintelligence specialist.’”

“Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2021, Jeff Carlton built up a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst,” the June 2022 article adds. “Between 2014 and 2017, his LinkedIn profile notes, he worked for both the CIA and FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama. Carlton describes his role as a ‘problem-solver’ and claims to have worked in many ‘dynamic, high-pressure environments’ such as Iraq and Korea. In May 2021, he left official service to become a senior program manager at Twitter, responsible for dealing with the company’s ‘highest-profile trust and safety escalations.’”

Ngo then clarified his original tweet: “Clarification: Jeff Carlton became head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team in November 2022, a role he inherited after working with the team since May 2021, according to his newly-deleted LinkedIn.”

On Thursday, Elon Musk confirmed that Twitter had engaged in massive election interference, including the politically motivated boosting and suppression of candidates’ accounts, along with a sweeping censorship operation that included the shadow banning and blacklisting of conservative Americans.

SOUTH AMERICA GOES SOCIALIST

BREAKING: Socialist criminal and globalist favorite, Lula da Silva, defeated Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s Presidential Election. The leftist former president had 50.46% of the votes, compared to 49.54% for the far-right president.

The Datafolha Institute predicted a narrow result, with 52% of the voting intentions for former President Lula compared to 48% for President Bolsonaro. In the first round, the polls underestimated the potential of Bolsonaro, who finally finished behind only by five points (43%-48%).

The 67-year-old president has sent mixed messages about whether he will recognize the results in the event of defeat. But, on Friday, he assured that he would do it: “Whoever has the most votes, he wins.”

In summary, the people have spoken: The Socialist-Marxists are now in charge of the entire continent in South America. Good thing those votes were counted by machines. Now we know they’re accurate.

Elon Musk Exposes Fauci

Journalist and media commentator Dave Rubin started a Twitter thread discussing the tremendous influence that Google and YouTube have on the nation’s politics.

“Let me get ahead of this one right now….” Rubin tweeted. “I think YouTube’s (and Google’s) manipulation for political purposes is FAR worse than Twitter’s, and we might find out as @rumblevideo will get discovery in its lawsuit against Google.”

One user suggested Musk try to buy Substack, a subscription-based platform used by many influential journalists.

“You would have the information layer with Twitter and the narrative layer. Corporate media would then have specialized reporting on government leaks from ‘people familiar with the matter,’” the user said.

Musk responded by saying: “I’m open to the idea.”

Earlier in December, Musk suggested he could try to buy Wikipedia but was informed it was not for sale by its founder, Jimmy Wales.

The “Twitter Files,” a series of releases on Twitter showing the prior regime’s coordination between Big Tech and U.S. government agencies, has been spearheaded by several notable journalists, such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger. The subsequent Fauci Files and forthcoming Covid Files have additionally spurred independent journalistic accountability that has been denied by corporate media and the U.S. Congress.

On Wednesday, Musk dropped a ‘Fauci bomb’ that exposed Twitter’s extreme bias on Covid issues:

“Almost no one seems to realize that the head of bioethics at NIH – the person who is supposed to make sure that Fauci behaves ethically – is his wife. ‘Gain-of-function’ in this context is just another way of saying ‘bioweapon… important to note that Fauci authored a 2012 paper arguing for gain-of-function research! Obama wisely put this on pause, but Fauci restarted it… despite these glaring issues, Twitter nonetheless had an internal Slack channel unironically called ‘Fauci Fan Club,’” he added.

Dr. Pierry Cory, in a Twitter Spaces on Wednesday, praised Twitter for providing a forum for physicians and policy critics to discuss the pervasive bias in medicine, which would help correct the “information asymmetry” perpetuated by the mainstream media and in medical journals.

Elon Musk also fired a warning shot to the corporate media about his mission to protect free speech and develop a forum for actual journalism. His response came after an attack by Axios reporter Hope King on CNBC, who said that his “reputation is in danger.”

“The legacy media should worry about its reputation,” Musk retorted. “We have only just begun.”

The Washington Post: Over Half of Coronavirus Deaths Now are Among the ‘Vaccinated’

The Washington Post offloaded a blockbuster analysis over the holiday break. It’s the first time a mainstream publication acknowledged that the majority of Americans dying from Covid-19 were at one point considered “fully vaccinated.”

“For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine,” the Post analysis conceded.

“Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, Vice President at the Kaiser Family Foundation.”

Furthermore, the article acknowledged that a significant number of the “vaccinated” were Covid-related deaths going back to September 2021.

“It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year,” the Post analysis continued. “As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.”

That surge to the “vaccinated” representing one-quarter of all Covid-related deaths occurred just weeks after the Delta variant case spike in August. Thus, the Covid-19 vaccines did not live up to the “100% safe and effective” hype for even one year after the initial series. It is a pattern more consistent with “flu shots” than actual “vaccines” that prevent infection and transmission.

The “100% safe and effective” lie actually originated in 2021. However, this soon became “95% safe and effective,” as a February 2021 Reason story explained.

“The COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are about 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic illness,” author Ronald Bailey claimed. “What does that really mean? It does not mean that 95 percent of people are protected from disease with the vaccine, as Oxford Centre for Global Health Research infectious disease specialist Piero Olliaro recently explained in the Lancet. Olliaro notes that an earlier ambiguous editorial in the Lancet may have led readers to make just such a mistaken inference.”

“What the 95 percent figure really means here is that vaccinated people in the clinical trials had a 95 percent lower risk of getting COVID-19 compared with the unvaccinated control group participants. That means that vaccinated people were 20 times less likely than the control group to get COVID-19.”

“Olliaro looked at what a 95 percent vaccine efficacy rate would mean in a hypothetical case in which a population of 100,000 people have all been vaccinated,” he added.

“Applying the 1 percent rate at which unvaccinated folks became ill during the vaccine trials over three months suggests that 1,000 people in an unvaccinated population of 100,000 would fall ill. But because all 100,000 people are vaccinated, the actual rate in the vaccinated population would be just 50 cases (0.05 x 1,000 = 50 cases).”

It is important to note that the Washington Post story above explodes the “100% safe and effective” myth well before September 2021.

It is nearly three years after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and two years after the novel mRNA Covid “vaccines” were first introduced. Yet, the excess mortality rate — the most critical indicator for the effectiveness of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) — remains above baseline.

This simply should not be happening if the Covid vaccines were even 95% “safe and effective,” lockdowns actually protected people, and masks stopped the spread.

Dr. Jha, the White House’s Covid coordinator, nonetheless misled Americans in a press conference on Tuesday, claiming that vaccination and boosters could prevent every Covid-related death in America.

In one of his last press conferences at the White House, Dr. Fauci claimed that the “real danger” in America is people not being “vaccinated.”

As the CDC pointed out, over 95% of Americans have protection against Covid-19. The currently predominant BA.4 and BA.5 variants are far less deadly than earlier strains, and an estimated 97% of Americans have natural immunity from prior infection, according to CDC data.

The Experts’ false claims about the “vaccines” preventing Covid-19 deaths have now been completely exposed for the world to see. The White House can continue to lie to Americans’ faces about the Covid shots. Still, informed news consumers can look no further than the mainstream media to finally get the truth.

DeSantis targets woke universities: Replacing indoctrination with education

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Leaked documents suggest Florida’s governor is taking aim at indoctrination and liberal bias present in the state’s universities.

A recently publicized 70-page proposal drafted by lawmakers at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis shows faculty hiring at universities could become the responsibility of a board of trustees, many of whom are DeSantis allies or appointees.

The bill, obtained earlier this week by Seeking Rents, intends to take away substantial amounts of power and independence from public universities and colleges.

During a press conference June 5, DeSantis harpooned the current state of education: “We believe that when parents send their kids to school, it’s for education, not for indoctrination.”

According to the proposal, Florida’s Board of Governors, which currently oversees universities in the state, along with the Board of Education would have much more influence on the way these public schools are operated.

The Board of Governors would have the ability to veto budgets, investigate university presidents and even fire employees. Fourteen of the 17 members on this board are directly appointed by DeSantis. In addition, all seven members of the Board of Education are appointed by DeSantis.

The board of trustees at state universities also typically supports DeSantis. These boards are generally set to have 13 members, six of whom are appointed by DeSantis and five of whom are picked by the Florida Board of Governors.

If the bill as written becomes law, the trustees and DeSantis would have much more power in the way state education systems are operated.

Cutting Funding

The DeSantis-backed measure vows to cut some state funding for universities and colleges that do not follow state laws or regulations.

For example, the governor encouraged universities to send out voluntary “intellectual surveys” in April of this year. These surveys ask a series of questions to employees and students to help gauge the political bias or temperature present in Florida’s higher education system.

While these surveys are currently voluntary, the leaked legislation would make fundraising cuts to institutions that refuse to send out the surveys.

Banning Racial Politics

The bill would also effectively ban any teaching related to “identity politics, such as critical race theory,” or that “defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

College and university curricula would be required to “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, such as the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments and the Federalist Papers.”

Limiting Teacher Tenure

DeSantis’ fight against colleges and universities began back in April when he signed a bill that limits tenure in Florida’s education system. The bill, SB7044, requires “each tenured state university faculty member to undergo a comprehensive post-tenure review every five years.”

This review includes examination of tenured employees’ “accomplishments and productivity; assigned duties in research, teaching and service; performance metrics, evaluations and ratings; and recognition and compensation considerations, as well as improvement plans and consequences for underperformance.”

The Moral Idiocy of Gun Control

Is it more moral to own a gun or to pay someone else to do it for you?

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

I was chatting with a horrified Swedish visitor who described a visit to Nevada.

“There was this grandmother, an elderly lady, and she took out a gun from her purse,” he told me, shaking his head.

We were having this conversation in a city which had racked up 77 shootings in just one month.

Few New Yorkers legally own guns. The NYPD has issued around 40,000 handgun permits in a city of over 8 million. That’s around one handgun for every two-hundred New Yorkers.

Don’t assume that the parts of the city with the most guns are the most dangerous.

The vast majority of handgun permits are in Staten Island, which has the lowest crime rate in the city, as opposed to the Bronx, with the highest. Manhattan has few legal guns relative to its population while the white working class areas of Brooklyn have some of the most legal guns.

The Daily News, which interviewed a criminologist as part of its anti-gun crusade, found that he was “puzzled”. “Some people see a mugging in the Bronx, and they want to get a gun on Staten Island,” he argued. “That’s not rational, but some people really want guns.”

Perhaps one of the reasons that there are fewer muggings in Staten Island is that more of the folks there can prevent them. Muggers, like most predators, prefer victims who don’t fight back.

Big city progressives find guns indefinably ‘icky’. It’s not only foreigners who marvel at a country where guns, even ‘big scary black ones’, are available everywhere. The propaganda of Michael Moore’s “Bowling in Columbine” and countless network news shows is that people who live surrounded by guns have created the conditions for mass shootings. And they have it coming.

But New Yorkers, like most big city dwellers, live surrounded by guns. These aren’t the guns that ride on trucks or sit in sporting goods store displays. They’re the guns flashed by a mugger under his heavy down winter coat, or shot by rival gang members exchanging fire in the 73rd precinct in Brooklyn which accounted for around 100 shootings in just one year alone.

And there are the guns worn more openly by the army of police officers, security guards, bodyguards, and others, many of whom live on Staten Island, who are hired to keep New Yorkers safe. Two years ago, Bond, an app that some have called ‘Uber for Bodyguards’ debuted, allowing New Yorkers to order their own security personnel. New Yorkers, who disdain guns, instead tap an app for bodyguards to escort them from their train stop to their office.

Most urbanites hate living in this kind of  world, but they hate the alternative even more.

Gun control isn’t policy, it’s culture. And while the media often goes on about “gun culture”, there’s little thought given to “gun control culture” for the same reason that fish rarely film documentaries on what it’s like to have gills and swim underwater.

Gun control culture means paying men with guns between $50,000 to $85,000 a year in the hopes that they’ll show up in under 10 minutes and do something useful when you call 911.

That strategy didn’t work very well in Uvalde. It doesn’t work all that well most of the time.

Before Uvalde, in the recent Buffalo mass shooting, a 911 operator hung up on a store employee calling for help. The cops arrived in 5 minutes: in time to talk the shooter out of killing himself in front of the store so that taxpayers can pay for his trial and a 50-year prison term.

And that’s what a fantastic response time looks like. But by then, 10 people were dead.

Gun control culture pathologically hates guns, but also hates the men it hires to wield them. Urban lefties threw an anti-police tantrum that was so successful that their cities are frantically trying to hire more police officers to keep up with the resulting crime wave on their streets.

Police defunding is deader than the thousands of additional murder victims in the Year of BLM.

Gun control is a fantasy that somehow making guns as illegal in the rest of the country as they are in New York will put a stop to all the violence so that urban and suburban elites won’t have  to choose between being victims or paying the armed men they disapprove of to protect them.

Eliminating guns isn’t actually on the table.

This is a choice between an empowered public of gun owners and an endless running battle between cops and thugs in a society where only criminals and governments have guns.

A nationwide New York or Chicago.

Most Americans don’t want to live in this kind of world. Neither does anyone else. That’s why the wealthy hipsters who poured into New York City after Giuliani cleaned it up are leaving. Those who can afford it, go to the suburbs or to wealthy enclaves in other parts of the city. While crime hasn’t entirely depopulated the city, it has put a stop to gentrification. A slow motion white flight is happening all over again even though its participants are too ashamed to admit it.

The sharp division between gun culture and gun control culture is the border of an affected distancing from life’s realities. Gun controllers aren’t necessarily physical cowards, but they are moral cowards.

The same sorts of people who think guns are ‘icky’ also don’t want to know where their meat comes from or to see the soldiers who come back from the wars. These are things that they pay other people to do because it preserves their illusions about the world and about themselves.

America is becoming a nation split between those hard workers who take responsibility for dealing with life’s realities and the managerial elites who only issue meaningless orders.

Faced with shootings, managerial elites apply rule-based abstractions to messy realities that they are incapable of grappling with. The Left is always good for easy solutions that take away agency from individuals and invest it in a central authority in order to solve the unsolvable problems of human nature. And the managerial elites are always suckers for the myth that getting everyone to follow the rules in line with some grand theory will solve everything.

The people who, as the champion of managerial elites, once claimed, “cling bitterly” to their guns, understand that life is messy and that there’s no grand fix, only a series of choices.

Gun ownership is an act of personal responsibility. By buying and owning a firearm, a man is saying that he also intends to take ownership of his personal safety and his choices. That doesn’t always end happily, but there’s far more moral self-awareness in that choice than there is in urban elites who hate guns paying the gun owners they despise to keep them safe.

The one thing we absolutely own in this world are our choices.

Gun control isn’t about stopping gun violence, but disavowing moral responsibility for preventing it, passing the buck to the cops, to society, and to some force outside our control. Gun control rallies are the virtue signaling of moral cowards seeking to blame someone else for horrors that they cannot cope with and that they do not intend to take any personal action to prevent.

Disarmament, national or personal, is not a moral stance, but the abandonment of morality.

Gun controllers have had a field day with the inaction of the Uvalde cops, but it never occurs to them that’s who they are, standing around, wringing their hands and waiting for someone to tell them what the plan is, so they don’t have to make any difficult choices in the face of a crisis.

Gun control is the moral idiocy of the irresponsible blaming those who have taken responsibility.