Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Ari Cohn
On Sunday, President-elect Donald Trump announced he would appoint FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to chair the agency, calling him a ‘warrior for Free Speech.’ But that honorific — as well as some of Carr’s own past statements about the First Amendment — stands in stark contrast to a threatening letter Carr sent last week to the CEOs of several tech companies asking for information about their relationship with NewsGuard, in order to ‘help inform FCC action.’ NewsGuard is a private organization that conducts fact-checking and provides credibility ratings for news and information outlets. … tech companies and private fact-checking groups are not curtailing anyone’s First Amendment rights. The First Amendment binds only government actors, not social media platforms or other private digital information services. Carr knows this, by his own admission …” (11/20/24)
“Mandating specific courses from a centralized legislative body is a too-little-too-late strategy that will not shift the core of the underlying problem facing higher education, namely the loss of purpose. Suppose you mandate certain authors or books to be taught at all universities, what guarantees that professors will even present such works in a sympathetic way? This would require further and further control to ensure that institutions are meeting ideological goals. These types of command-and-control policies miss the complexity across disciples and the needs across society. To use politics as an all-encompassing category justifying legislative mandates is to make the same mistake as those on the left who would fold all of human experience into the purview of the state.” (11/20/24)
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s list of disqualifications for the role of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is long and well documented. He is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, vowed to remove fluoride from drinking water, and spewed race science, claiming that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are immune from COVID-19. But despite all of the above, RFK Jr. seems to appeal to many not just on the political right, but also on the left. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat who has been firm in his post-election commitments to insulate Coloradans from the Trump administration, wrote on X on November 14: ‘I’m excited by the news that the President-Elect will appoint @RobertKennedyJr to @HHSGov. He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.'” (11/20/24)
“We must hope that a Democratic effort in Pennsylvania to steal the election for U.S. senator has indeed been thwarted. A new state supreme court ruling with its concurring opinions is definitive.
Problem is, a previous ruling from the same court had already been definitive. Yet not only have election officials been counting unsigned or undated or improperly dated mail-in ballots in an effort to rescue incumbent Democrat Bob Casey from defeat at the hands of his Republican challenger, Dave McCormick, via a rejiggering recount, at least some of the election officials breaking the law weren’t even bothering to try to obscure the effort with an ‘Aw geez, this is perfectly compatible with a reasonable interpretation of election rules and the supreme court ruling’ fig leaf.” (11/20/24)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“Whatever you think of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, he has learned one thing from his first term: few Beltway truisms are truer than personnel is policy. Trump wants to make a sharp break with the status quo. … This is the no-guardrails Trump team that Vice President Kamala Harris warned you about. … The Senate is part of a separate branch of government and has its own constitutional prerogatives. This includes the advise and consent powers, which gives senators a say in the makeup of the Trump administration and the federal judiciary. Just because they have the power to do so, however, doesn’t mean it would necessarily be a good idea for the Republican Senate majority to eagerly veto Trump’s choices.” (11/20/24)
“A series of events last month underscored the Indo-Pacific’s shift toward a balance shaped increasingly by the actions and priorities of regional states rather than Western intervention led by the United States. This shift reflects both Asia’s internal dynamics and Western miscalculations, which have collectively accelerated the transition. In mid-October, China and India agreed to disengage their militaries and restore patrolling rights along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC). This move, significant for both regional stability and strategic reallocation, presents an opportunity for Beijing and New Delhi to improve bilateral relations and focus military resources on other priorities — such as China’s interest in Taiwan.” (11/20/24)
“It’s been 14 days since the Democrats have had to face the truth. They stink worse than the Capitol’s men’s room after Jerry Nadler’s lunch of curry clam soup. Poor Jerry. We’ve talked about what the winners can do now. What about the losers? And there are losers. But it’s not the ones having public meltdowns. They’re victims, too. They’re no different than a hypochondriac being told that their pimple is a tumor. I’m talking about the party elites like Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff or David Muir, the idiots who fueled all those lies. So, normally, we don’t give advice to people who hate us, but we’re only doing this because we want them to be as happy as we are, or at least as bubbly as Brit Hume.” (11/20/24)
“Every politician in Washington, including all the psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, could just go home; and we could even eliminate the unnecessary ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’ (Ain’t it funny how the government has to create yet another executive agency for the ostensible purpose of shrinking the government? Kinda like how the government had to bankrupt Spirit Airlines to save it, which is like how, during the war against the people of Vietnam, the US government had to destroy the villages to save them.)” (11/19/24)
Source: Independent Institute
by William J Watkins
“This was not 2016 when Donald Trump lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college with 306 votes to Hilary Clinton’s 232. Last week, Trump garnered 74,677,434 votes to Harris’[s] 71,147,994 votes and won the Electoral College with 312 electoral votes to Harris’[s] 226. No previous Republican presidential candidate has ever won this many popular votes. All this in the face of a relentless media campaign painting Trump as a fascist, an insurrectionist, and a danger to American democracy. So, what are we to make of the results?” (11/19/24)
“[B]y reaching out to Trump, Scarborough and Brzezinski are proving that they are finally putting their audience first again. Their job is not to reinforce their friends’ biases, but to report and analyze the truth. You cannot do that if you insult and disengage with anyone who disagrees with you or attempt to bury anything unflattering to your friends.” (11/19/24)
