Jts5665

Special Counsel David Weiss appears to have finally made the long-awaited case exposing years of concealment and political corruption. No, it is not the case against Hunter Biden. The allegations of tax fraud in California are obvious and unavoidable. Weiss just made the case against the Justice Department and himself in protecting Hunter Biden from the most damaging charges of being an unregistered foreign agent. In a new filing, Weiss released evidence on Hunter seeking money to advance the interests of a Romanian on United States policy.

I have previously testified on the Foreign Agents Registration Act and have previously written about the disturbing disconnect in the treatment of the President’s son as opposed to figures like Paul Manafort.

The charge was always one of the greatest fears of the White House. If Hunter Biden was a foreign agent, it would magnify the influence peddling scandal and further link his conduct to work of his father as vice president and later president.

What was previously known about millions received from China, Russia, and other countries made such a charge obvious. In the past, the Justice Department has used the charge early and often in high-profile cases to pressure defendants and force cooperation or plea agreements. During the Trump Administration, an official could not go to Epcot without drawing a FARA charge from DOJ.

This charge has been a favorite of the DOJ before the President’s son was implicated in a massive influence peddling scheme with foreign figures.

Here is the definition used in such cases:

A “foreign agent” is defined as “(1) any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal, and who directly or through any other person— (i) engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (ii) acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee or political consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal; (iii) within the United States solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value for or in the interest of such foreign principal; or (iv) within the United States represents the interests of such foreign principal before any agency or official of the Government of the United States; and (2) any person who agrees, consents, assumes or purports to act as, or who is or holds himself out to be, whether or not pursuant to contractual relationship, an agent of a foreign principal as defined in clause (1) of this subsection.”

For years, I have expressed alarm at the special treatment afforded to Hunter Biden on the charges.  Many of us have also criticized Weiss for allowing the most serious tax charges to expire despite being able to extend the statute of limitations. He has yet to offer a compelling reason why prosecutors would ever allow viable felony charges to expire when they could have extended that period.

Now, Biden is seeking to avoid conviction under the tax charges in California. He is repeating the claims that failed in his recent gun violation. He is claiming that he was an addict and not responsible for his criminal conduct, even though he was flying around the world collecting millions from foreign sources.

To rebut that claim, Weiss’ team said they plan to introduce evidence showing his sophisticated scheme to tap foreign sources interested in influencing the government and federal policy.

In the filing below, Weiss opposes the Biden team effort to exclude the evidence of his working for the Romanians. Senior assistant special counsel Derek Hines writes in the filing that “[t]he evidence of what the defendant agreed to do and did do for [the businessman] demonstrates the defendant’s state of mind and intent during the relevant tax years charged in the indictment. It is also evidence that the defendant’s actions do not reflect someone with a diminished capacity, given that he agreed to attempt to influence U.S. public policy and receive millions of dollars pursuant to an oral agreement.”

That sounds a lot like seeking the work of a foreign agent. Here is the language from FARA:

It is a curious argument. It is akin to saying that we know that he stole the car because he used it in the kidnapping. It leaves most people wondering why you did not charge on the kidnapping crime.

The fact is that this is only one of an array of such contracts that have been detailed by the House Oversight Committee and other House committees. The other foreign dealings reportedly involved Hunter reaching out to government officials while his father was vice president. That includes the controversy over Joe Biden’s sudden decision to issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainian government.

In a 2018 interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he unilaterally withheld a billion dollars in US aid from the Ukrainians to force them to fire prosecutor general Viktor Shokin.

The Ukrainians balked, but Biden gave them an ultimatum: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

However, a State Department memo is shedding disturbing light on that account and shredding aspects of Biden’s justification for the action. It directly contradicts Biden’s insistence that he took this extraordinary stand because there was little hope for the anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine if Shokin remained prosecutor.

The Oct. 1, 2015, memo summarizes the recommendation of the Interagency Policy Committee that was handling the anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine: “Ukraine has made sufficient progress on its reform agenda to justify a third guarantee.” One senior official even complimented Shokin on his progress in fighting corruption. So Biden was told to deliver on the federal aid but elected to unilaterally demand Shokin be fired.

In testimony from Devon Archer, a business associate of Hunter Biden, we learned that Burisma executives made the removal of Shokin a top priority and raised it with Hunter. He described how the need to neutralize Shokin was raised with Hunter and how “a call to Washington” was made in response. While Archer also said that “the narrative spun to me was that Shokin was under control,” he and others also heard concerns over Shokin and the risks of the investigation.

Other transactions directly requested intervention on matters being addressed by the Obama-Biden Administration.

So, now, the Justice Department is citing some of these dealings to show a conscious and premeditated effort to shake down foreigners to influence U.S. policy. Weiss now maintains that “The defendant did receive compensation from a foreign principal to attempt to influence U.S. policy and public opinion, as alleged in the indictment, and this evidence is relevant.”

They have made more than the case against Hunter Biden. They have made a conclusive and overwhelming case against themselves in slow walking and minimizing charges against the President’s son.

Here is the filing: gov.uscourts.cacd.907805.181.0

Below is my column in The Hill on the move of the European Union to force Elon Musk to censor X users, including political speech leading up to the 2024 election. The column discusses this Rockwell painting, which we often use in discussing free speech controversies.

Here is the column:

Eighty years ago, the U.S. government launched a war bond campaign featuring a painting by artist Norman Rockwell in the struggle against the authoritarian threat from Europe. The picture they chose was Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech depicting a man rising to speak his mind at a local council meeting in Vermont. The image rallied the nation around what Louis Brandeis called our “indispensable right.”

Now, that very right is again under attack from another European government, which is claiming the right to censor what Americans are allowed to say about politics, science and other subjects. Indeed, the threat from the European Union may succeed in curtailing American freedom to an extent that the Axis powers could not have imagined. They may win, and our leaders have not said a thing yet about it.

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the inspiration for Rockwell’s painting: a young selectman in Vermont named James “Buddy” Edgerton. The descendent of a Revolutionary War hero, Edgerton stood up as the lone dissenter to a plan to build a new schoolhouse over the lack of funding for such construction.

For Rockwell, the scene was a riveting example of how one man in this country can stand alone and be heard despite overwhelming opposition to his views. It was, for Rockwell (and for many of us), the quintessential American moment.

In the 1940s, people like Edgerton had to travel to small board meetings or public spaces to speak their mind. Today, the vast majority of political speech occurs over the Internet and specifically social media. That is why the internet is the single greatest advancement for free speech since the printing press.

It is also the reason governments have spent decades seeking to control speech over the internet, to regulate what people can say or read.

One of the greatest threats to free speech today is the European Digital Services Act. The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”

In Europe, free speech is in free fall. Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other countries have eviscerated free speech by criminalizing speech deemed inciteful or degrading to individuals or groups. The result had made little difference to the neo-Nazi movement in countries like Germany, which is reaching record numbers. It has, however, silenced the rest of society.

According to polling, only 18 percent of Germans feel free to express their opinions in public. Fifty-nine percent of Germans do not even feel free expressing themselves in private among friends. Only 17 percent feel free to express themselves on the internet.

They have silenced the wrong people, but there is now a massive censorship bureaucracy in Europe and the desire to silence opposing voices has become insatiable.

Some in this country have the same taste for speech-regulation. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.

In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans.

The EU immediately responded by threatening Musk with confiscatory penalties against not just his company but himself. He would have to resume massive censorship or else face ruin.

It was a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The anti-free speech movement had finally found the one man who could not be bullied, coerced or threatened into submission.

Musk’s defiance has only magnified the unrelenting attacks against him in the media, academia and government. If Musk can be broken, these figures will once again exercise effective control over a large swath of speech globally.

This campaign recently came to a head when Musk had the audacity to interview former president Donald Trump. In anticipation of the interview, one of the most notorious anti-free speech figures in the world went ballistic.

European Commissioner for Internal Markets and Services Thierry Breton issued a threatening message to Musk, “We are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.”

While offering a passing nod to the freedom of speech, he warned Musk that “all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events.” In other words, be afraid, be very afraid.

Musk responded with “Bonjour!” and then suggested that Breton perform a physically challenging sexual act.

To recap, the EU is now moving to force censorship upon American citizens to meet its own demands of what is false, demeaning or inciting. And that includes censorship even of our leading political candidates for the presidency.

The response from the Biden administration was not a presidential statement warning any foreign government from seeking to limit our rights or even Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling the EU ambassador to his office for an expression of displeasure.

That’s because Biden and Harris are not displeased with but supportive of letting the EU do what they are barred from doing under our Constitution. This administration is arguably the most anti-free speech government since John Adams signed the Sedition Act. They have supported a massive system of censorship, blacklisting and targeting of opposing voices. Democratic members have given full-throated support for censorship, including pushing social media companies to expand in areas ranging from climate control to gender identity.

So, after only 80 years, our leaders are silent as a European government threatens to reduce our political speech to the lowest common denominator, which they will set according to their own values. Not a shot will be fired as Biden and Harris simply yield our rights to a global governing system.

But we do not have to go quietly into this night. Free speech remains a human right that is part of our DNA as Americans. We can fight back and protect millions of Edgertons who want to express their views regardless of the judgment of the majority.

I previously called for legislation to get the U.S. government out of the censorship business domestically. We also need new legislation to keep other countries from regulating the speech of our own citizens and companies. While this country has long threatened retaliation in combatting market barriers in other countries, we need to do the same thing for free speech. We need a federal law that opposes the intrusion of the Digital Services Act into the U.S.

If free speech is truly the “indispensable right” of all Americans, we need to treat this threat as an attack on our very existence. It is not only the rawest form of foreign intervention into an election, but a foreign attack on our very freedoms. This is why we must pass a Digital Freedom Act.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

“In 2008, I was framed for murder and wrongfully convicted by the office of Kamala Harris, sentenced 50 to life in prison,” Jamal Trulove, an African-American actor said.

In its hit song London Calling the Clash warns:

“London calling to the faraway towns

Now that war is declared and battle come down

London calling to the underworld

Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls”

According to a new report, the British punk rock band may have been prophetic in 1979 in a way never foreseen in its apocalyptic lyrics.  This week, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that the police will not necessarily confine its arrests for speech crimes to London or even the United Kingdom. Rowley suggests that Americans and other citizens could be extradited and brought to London for online postings.

London has been hit with days of violent protests over immigration policies, including attacks and arson directed at immigration centers. This violence has been fueled by false reports spread online about the person responsible for an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event that left three girls dead and others wounded. Despite false claims about his being an asylum seeker, the culprit was an 18-year-old British citizen born to Rwandan parents.

News outlets and pundits have condemned the false reports and the violent protests. However, the police are moving to arrest those who are repeating false claims or engaging in inflammatory speech. Rowley is warning that they will not stop at the city limit or even the country’s borders.

He warned “We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”

Rowley was asked by a reporter about the criticism by Elon Musk and others over the response of the government. Musk noted a video of someone allegedly arrested for offensive online comments with a question, “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”

Pundits and politicians in the United Kingdom have called for an investigation or the arrest of Musk for merely speaking publicly on the controversy.

The reporter said that high profile figures have been “whipping up the hatred,” and that “the likes of Elon Musk” are involved in the online speech. She then asked what the London police are prepared to do “when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behavior from behind the keyboard who may be in a different country?”

Rowley told the reporter:

“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the yobs who are taking — who are causing the problems for communities.”

The message is chilling because free speech has been in a free fall in the United Kingdom as well as other Western countries. I discuss this trend in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates. A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers. Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.” Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.”

We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crack down on free speech.

The London police are now deputized to stop or arrest those engaged in speech deemed inciteful or inflammatory. Last year, the police stopped a man from walking in the street because there were pro-Palestinian protesters and his presence would be inciteful because he was “quite openly Jewish.”

The United Kingdom has a myriad of laws criminalizing speech with vague terms allowing for arbitrary enforcement. For example, Public Order Act 1986 prohibits any expressions of racial hatred, defined as hatred against a group of persons by reason of the group’s color, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.

Section 18 of the Act specifically includes any speech that is “threatening, abusive, or insulting.” An arrest does not have to be based on a showing of intent to “stir up racial hatred,” but can merely be based on a charge that “having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”

The country has also targeted social media companies to force them to censor users for speech deemed threatening, abusive or insulting by the government.

These ambiguous laws are written on the same “trust us, we’re the government” rationale. The police insist that they will use their discretion wisely in what speech will result in arrest.

Ordinarily, one would expect the U.S. government to push back on the suggestion that these laws could be used to arrest and extradite its citizens for the use of free speech. However, the Biden-Harris Administration has been a proponent of censorship and blacklisting for years. At the same time, leading Democrats have called for European-type laws to be adopted or enforced against U.S. citizens for their views on social media.

We previously discussed how Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign countries to use or pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter.

The effort of these politicians would allow free speech to be reduced to the lowest common denominator as countries export their anti-free speech laws. When Clinton called upon Europeans to censor Americans, this is precisely what such actions would look like.  These foreign countries could force Americans to curtail their speech under the threat of ruinous financial penalties or even arrest.

As some of us predicted, these laws have expanded as the desire to silence others becomes an insatiable appetite. Advocacy groups have pushed the police to crackdown on their critics.  Now, the threat to “throw the full force of the law at people” may be extended to the people of other nations.

We could all soon be dancing to that same tune:

“London calling, see we ain’t got no swing

Except for the ring of that truncheon thing”

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has introduced the “No Kings Act” with great fanfare and the support of most of his Democratic colleagues. Liberal groups have heralded the measure to legislatively reverse the ruling in Trump v. United States. It is obviously popular with the press and pundits. It is also entirely unconstitutional in my view. The “No Kings Act” is not just a cynical abdication of responsibility by Democrats, but would constitute the virtual decapitation of the Constitution.

I have previously written about the false claims made about the Supreme Court’s decision by President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and other leading democrats. The press and pundits have reached a new level of sensationalism and hysteria in the coverage with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow even claiming that it was a “death squad ruling.”

The Trump Decision

The Court actually rejected the most extreme positions of both the Trump team and the lower courts.

As it has in the past, the Court adopted a three-tiered approach to presidential powers based on the source of a presidential action. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which the court ruled against President Harry Truman’s takeover of steel mills.

In his famous concurrence to Youngstown, Justice Robert Jackson broke down the balance of executive and legislative authority between three types of actions. In the first, a president acts with express or implied authority from Congress. In the second, he acts where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area). In the third, the president acts in defiance of Congress.

In this decision, the court adopted a similar sliding scale. It held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial or private actions.

Where the coverage has been wildly inaccurate, the No Kings Act is cynically dishonest.

To his credit, President Joe Biden was at least honest in proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision in Trump.  However, that was dead on arrival in Congress since under Article V it would require a two-thirds majority vote in both houses and then ratification by three-fourths of the states.

The Democrats are seeking to circumvent that process with simple majority votes with the No Kings Act.

The bill is being presented as a jurisdiction-stripping measure, not an effort to dictate outcomes.

Congress does have authority to change the jurisdiction of the federal courts.  That authority was recognized by the Court itself in Ex parte McCardle (1869). Chief Justice Salmon Chase ruled that it did have the authority “to make exceptions to the appellate jurisdiction of this court.”

However, Chase also emphasized that the law did “not affect the jurisdiction which was previously exercised” so that prior decisions would remain fully enforceable.

Moreover, shortly after McCardle, the Court ruled in United States v. Klein (1871), that Congress may not use its authority of court jurisdiction to lay out a “rule of decision” for the Supreme Court, or effectively dictate results in court cases.

The No Kings Act

The No Kings Act does more than just strip jurisdiction and makes no secret of its purpose in dictating the outcome of future cases.

It purports in Section 2 to “clarify that a President or Vice President is not entitled to any form of immunity from criminal prosecution for violations of the criminal laws of the United States unless specified by Congress.”

That is a rather Orwellian view of “clarification” since it directly contradicts the opinion in declaring in the very next section that “[a] President, former President, Vice President, or former Vice President shall not be entitled to any form of immunity (whether absolute, presumptive, or otherwise) from criminal laws of the United States unless specified by Congress.”

Schumer and most of the Democratic senators actually believe that they can simply instruct lower courts to ignore a Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the Constitution. It would undermine the basis of  Marbury v. Madison after 221 years.

To be sure, it is stated in strictly jurisdictional terms. Yet, it crafts the jurisdictional changes to mirror the decision and future immunity claims.

The bill declares that federal courts “may not consider whether an alleged violation of any criminal laws of the United States committed by a President or Vice President was within the conclusive or preclusive constitutional authority of a President or Vice President or was related to the official duties of a President or Vice President unless directed by Congress.”

But the Democrats are not done yet. Section 4 actually removes the Supreme Court from such questions and makes appellate courts the effective highest courts of the land when it comes to presidential immunity:

“The Supreme Court of the United States shall have no appellate jurisdiction, on the basis that an alleged criminal act was within the conclusive or preclusive constitutional authority of a President or Vice President or on the basis that an alleged criminal act was related to the official duties of a President or Vice President.”

Notably, this is one of the wacky ideas put forward by the President’s Supreme Court Commission. After all, why pack the Court if you can just gut it?

Of course, some sponsors like Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) want to both pack the Court and strip it of authority. Presumably, once packed, the authority to act as a court would be at least restored with the liberal majority.

By making the D.C. Circuit (where most of these cases are likely to be litigated) the highest court of the land on the question, the Democrats are engaging in the rawest form of forum shopping. The D.C. Circuit is expected to remain in the control of Democratic appointees for years. (The Act expressly makes the D.C. courts the only place to bring a civil action in this area and states that “a decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shall be final and not appealable to the Supreme Court of the United States.”)

The Supreme Court of the United States shall have no appellate jurisdiction to declare any provision of this Act (including this section) unconstitutional or to bar or restrain the enforcement or application of any provision of this Act (including this section) on the ground of its unconstitutionality.

But wait there is more.

The No Kings Act reads like a fairy tale read by Democratic senators to their grandchildren at night. Not only would the evil conservative justices be vanquished by a lower court controlled by Democratic appointees, but the bill is filled with other wish list items from the far left. It would strip the Court of the ability to take other cases, to dismiss a criminal proceeding, to suppress evidence, and to grant a writ of habeas corpus, or “the Great Writ” that is the foundation of Anglo-American law for centuries.

The Democrats even legislatively dictate that any review of the law must meet a standard of its choosing. They dictate that “[a] court of the United States shall presume that a provision of this Act (including this section) or the enforcement or application of any such provision is constitutional unless it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that such provision or its enforcement or application is unconstitutional.”  Thus, even the clear and convincing provision of the Act must be subject to a clear and convincing evidence review.

The Death of Marbury?

Again, Democrats are insisting that they are merely changing the jurisdiction of the Court and not ordering outcomes. However, the sponsors make clear that this is meant to “reaffirm that the President is not immune to legal accountability.” Sponsors like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) declared that “Congress has the power to undo the damage of this decision” by a “captured Court.”

The greatest irony is that the Democrats are practically reverting to the position of critics of Marbury v. Madison, who argued that the Framers never intended the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of what the law means. That principle has been the touchstone of American law since 1803, but the Democrats would now effectively revert to the English approach under the guise of jurisdiction stripping legislation. Before the Revolution, the Parliament could dictate what the law meant on such cases, overriding the courts. On a practical level, the Democrats would regress to that pre-Marbury approach.

Marbury introduced a critical stabilizing element in our system that contributed greatly to the oldest and most successful constitutional system in history. Democrats would now toss much of that aside in a spasm of partisan anger. Calling the No Kings Act a jurisdiction stripping bill does not conceal its intent or its implications for our system.

It is all a rather curious position for the party that claims to be defending the rule of law. The No Kings Act would constitute a radical change in our constitutional system to allow popular justice to be meted out through legislative fiat.

Sponsors like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., previously promised a “revolution” if the conservatives did not rule as the Democrats demanded. They have now fulfilled those threats, though few expected that they would undo the work following our own Revolution.

Just to be sure that the sponsorship of this infamous legislation is not soon forgotten, here are the senators willing to adopt this Constitution-destroying measure:

Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Jack Reed (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tom Carper (D-DE), Peter Welch (D-VT), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Bob Casey (D-PA), Chris Coons (D-DE), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Patty Murray (D-WA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Ed Markey (D-MA), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Laphonza Butler (D-CA), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Angus King (I-ME), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Raphael Warnock (D-GA).

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

The New York Times ran a guest editorial by Belle Boggs, a North Carolina author who had a bat fly in her house. It didn’t bite her, but she needed a sheriff’s deputy, a county health nurse, state animal control, the CDC, and an E.R. doctor to tell her what to do about that. Naturally, the episode led her to think of Donald Trump:

After our visit from the bat, our sheriff’s department, public health department and university hospital all functioned exactly as designed. The C.D.C., a huge federal agency that works to protect every one of us from infectious disease, food-borne illness and emerging threats like bird flu, pulled through. The C.D.C. is part of what Mr. Trump’s allies would call the administrative state and is in the cross hairs of Project 2025, which proposes breaking up the agency… I want to believe Kamala Harris is right when she says “we are not going back” to a time when every calamity leaves us on our own.

Leaving aside the problem of the ubiquitous personality who answers “Donald Trump” to every stain on the Rorschach test of life, the Boggs essay made me wonder about America’s prognosis. Early citizens packed kids in wagons and rode into forests teeming with human and animal predators. Now people reach middle age needing the federal government to tell them what to do if a bat flies past. It won’t hold:

Subscribe now

Read more

"Safety review" by Division of Metabolism and Endocrinology Products contradicts narrative promoted by HHS's Rachel Levine, FDA's child health and endocrinology leaders. Insurance coverage invoked to justify approval for "gender transition."

One of the only enjoyable things about the regime crowning Kamala Harris as president in all-but-name (keeping Joe Biden in the refrigerator until January in case they need a scapegoat to distract us from her many abject failures) is going through her not-so-ancient history of saying things that prove her to be a moronic political hack.

By Owen Klinsky Federal regulations added record-breaking costs of $2.1 trillion for the average American in 2023, according to a study from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released Tuesday. The large sum incorporates the calculated impact of federal regulations as well as compliance costs, resulting in a “hidden tax” of $15,788 per U.S. household, CEI’s […]

The post $2.1 Trillion ‘Hidden Tax’: Cost Of Federal Regulations Hit Record High In 2023, Report Says appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

Federal judge had greenlit related First Amendment lawsuit against diversity, equity and inclusion rules last fall. Parties were awaiting ruling by administrative law judge on Matthew Garrett's firing.

What do fairytales and scientific papers have in common? Consider the story of Rumpelstiltskin. 

A poor miller tries to impress the king by claiming his daughter can spin straw into gold. The avaricious king locks up the girl and tells her to spin out the gold. She fails, until a goblin, Rumpelstiltskin, comes to her rescue.  

In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”  

In the conventional realm of null-hypothesis testing of significance, this means using a threshold probability. Usually in biology and medicine the accepted cutoff is a probability of 0.05 (a chance of 5%, or one in 20) and its use is explicitly written into the description of the methods section of publications. Some branches of science, such as genetics and physics, use more stringent probability thresholds. But the necessity of having a threshold remains.  

How do researchers create the illusion of novelty in a result when the finding has a probability value close to, but on the wrong side of, the stated probability threshold – for example, a probability of 0.06? Talk it up, spin out a story! It’s the fairytale of Rumpelstiltskin in modern garb.  

Here are more than 500 examples of pretzel logic researchers have used to make claims of significance despite p values higher than .05. It would be comical if not for the serious obfuscation of science which the stories cause.  

In recent years, the practice of claiming importance and true significance for such results has been termed “spin.” More formally, we call it “reporting that could distort the interpretation of results and mislead readers.”

Increasingly, scholars are quantifying and analyzing the practice of spinning probability values. Linked to our development of a “Quality Output Checklist and Content Assessment” (i.e. QuOCCA) as a tool for assessing research quality and reproducibility, my colleagues and I have measured how often spin occurs in three prestigious journals, the Journal of Physiology, the British Journal of Pharmacology and the Journal of Neurophysiology.  

We found when probability values were presented in the results section of the publication, but were not quite statistically significant (greater than 0.05 but less than 0.10), authors talked up the findings and spun out a story in about 55%-65% of publications. Often, they wrote results “trended” to significance. Thus, results of straw can become results of gold! Attractive to the researchers, editors, publishing houses and universities.  

Putting spin on insignificant probability values is an egregious and shonky – that’s dubious, for our friends outside of Australia –  scientific practice. It shows the authors’ failure to appreciate the requirement of an absolute threshold for claiming the presence (or not) of an effect, or for supporting (or not) a hypothesis. It reveals an entrenched and incorrigible capacity for bias. Furthermore, the authors seem unaware of the fact that a probability value of, say, 0.07 is not even justifiable as a trend: The addition of further samples or participants does not inexorably move the probability value below the 0.05 threshold.  

The number of instances of spin within a publication has no theoretical limit; any probability value above 0.05 could be talked up. However, while our previous audits of publications in three journals have occasionally found more than one example of spin within a single publication, such casess seemed rare.  

A 2022 paper in the British Journal of Pharmacology titled “Deferiprone attenuates neuropathology and improves outcome following traumatic brain injury,” has obliterated this impression. On at least 25 occasions, the authors overhype results linked to a probability value exceeding 0.05. Some of the offending explanations use phrases such as: “did not reach significance but showed a strong trend (p=0.075);” “a trending yet non-significant preservation of neurons was seen;” “no significant changes were seen in proBDNF despite an increased trend.”

In the publication, by Daglas and colleagues, many probability values between 0.05 and 0.10 were spun, but even values above 0.10 were considered “trendy.” These included values of 0.11, 0.14, 0.16, 0.17, 0.23 and 0.24. The authors have not responded to my request for comment, 

As  the 2024 Paris Olympics get underway, it is tempting to ask: Does the featured publication set a World Record for scientific spin? Comment with your entries, please.

What should be done about the prevalence of spinning probability values? This question is part of a bigger dilemma. All levels of the “industry” of science know the problems caused by perpetuating shonky science, but their attempts at regulation and improvement are fraught with difficulty and impeded by self-interest. Education about science publication and mandatory requirements before publication are potentially helpful steps. 

The messages from Rumpelstiltskin should be that spinning straw can lead to trouble, and science is not a fairytale.  

Simon Gandevia is deputy director of Neuroscience Research Australia.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Isn't it funny that the people who claim to care the most about the "will of the people" don't seem to give a hoot about the will of the people?

You've heard of Sharknado. You've heard of Cocaine Bear. Now prepare for the worst of all worlds!

The West's headlong rush to jettison fossil fuels and hit 'Net Zero' CO2 emissions is impoverishing us while enriching China, which is ramping up its coal-fired industry to sell us all the 'green' technology.

The post Net Zero is Impoverishing the West and Enriching China appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The “LibsOfTikTok” Twitter account found a random Home Depot employee who said she wished the Trump assassin hadn’t missed. Her followers mass-called Home Depot and got the employee fired.

Moral of the story: despite everything, there’s apparently still a norm against assassinating politicians. But some on the right interpreted this as meaning something more. A sudden vibe shift, or impending Trump victory, has handed conservatives the levers of cancel culture! This sparked a right-wing blogosphere debate: should they be magnanimous in victory, or descend into an orgy of vengeance?

I appreciate the few voices speaking out in favor of principle (eg Librarian of Celaeno), but most favored the vengeance. A sample from my Substack Notes feed:

The most complete response was by Postcards From Barsoom, which recommended Right Wing Cancel Squads.

That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now.

In an ideal world, we would all give one another vastly greater latitude. No one would get mobbed, fired, forced to resign, kicked out of school, or ostracized from their professional networks for the non-crime of an unpopular opinion. No one would have to worry about people combing through decade-old social media posts looking for gotcha words that weren’t gotchas when they were written, but became crimespeak ex post facto.

In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse. This is a simple matter of technological context. Social media means that there is a more or less indelible record of your every public utterance; sure, you can try to scrub it, but that won’t stop screenshots; sure, you can try to cloak yourself behind a pseudonymous identity, but that just means you need to worry about doxxing. Cell phones mean that your private conversations can be recorded. We live in an electronic surveillance society now. We’re all watching one another, all the time, and short of a Carrington Event knocking us back into the iron age, there’s no realistic possibility of that changing. If we keep holding one another to impossible standards of public discourse, we will live in a totalitarian hell; that is, indeed, precisely the world that we have all lived in, for the last decade. The only way we avoid this is by adopting a public ethos that is exceptionally forgiving.

But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault.

[...]

If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.

Take a second to sympathize. From the Right’s perspective, the Left has beaten, shamed, and terrorized them for at least a decade. Now, the moment they get some chance to retaliate, their enemies say “Hey, bro, come on, being mean is morally wrong, you’ve got to be immaculately kind and law-abiding now that it’s your turn”, while still obviously holding behind their back the dagger they plan to use as soon as they’re on top again.

I won’t be able to convince anyone of the ethics of seeking vengeance vs. turning the other cheek. But a few thoughts on the specific practical arguments being deployed:

1. Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted

Going back to that excerpt from the Postcards From Barsoom blog:

If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

To this end, distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.

You mean like you’re doing now?

The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.

And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

2. This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic

“Given that liberals invented cancel culture ten years ago, shouldn’t we get ten years of conservative cancel culture, just to be fair?” asks someone totally divorced from historical reality.

Modern progressive cancel culture is the successor of the 1950s establishment that would cancel you for being an atheist pinko peacenik. Curtis Yarvin calls cancellation “the Brown Scare”, by analogy to the Red Scare that came before. And Arthur Miller called the Red Scare a “witch hunt”, by analogy to actual witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the history of burning heretics at the stake. And what was Diocletian’s persecution of the Early Church if not cancel culture?

People joke that “cancel culture began with Socrates”, but I don’t buy it. Seen on Wikipedia:

[In 1345 BC], Akhenaten … ordered the defacing of Amun's temples throughout Egypt … Archaeological discoveries at [Amarna] show that many ordinary residents of this city chose to gouge or chisel out all references to the god Amun on even minor personal items that they owned, such as commemorative scarabs or make-up pots, perhaps for fear of being accused of having Amunist sympathies.

When the Priests of Amun came back into power, they took the low road:

This culture shift away from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs.

And since righteous vengeance had been attained and both sides now had experience with cancel culture being morally wrong, everyone agreed the ledger was balanced, and nobody ever tried cancelling anyone else ever again.

No, seriously, we got the entire rest of history. Aldous Huxley famously described the state of things c. 1944 as:

Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are—there we are in the Golden Future.

Just one more indispensable cancellation, and there we are!

Instead, I think of unfreedom of conscience as a scourge that has troubled humanity throughout history, like famine or plague or war. As with all scourges, very-long-run progress coexists with occasional disastrous relapses. The solution isn’t to get the other side and balance the ledger, it’s to keep developing the physical and social technology that’s gradually improved things in the past.

3. You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People

An old psychoanalyst’s trick: if somebody ruminates too much over some decision, it’s to distract from some other decision they’re trying not to notice.

The hidden decision here is whether to treat people as collectives or individuals.

One of the fundamental problems with wokeness was that it believed in collective guilt and collective punishment. White people caused slavery, therefore white people stood condemned. No matter that the actual white person involved was 150 years removed from slavery, or was a Polish immigrant whose family hadn’t even been in the country at the time, or whatever. They have some excuse like “well all white people benefit from white supremacy in tangible ways, or at least didn’t speak out against it”.

I hate to say it, but “some left-wing journalist got people cancelled, therefore I should be able to cancel a left-wing Home Depot employee because The Left endorsed cancel culture” is the same kind of argument.

“But wasn’t the Left monolithically united behind cancel culture?” You can find some data here. I’m presenting a representative sample of questions, but check the rest to keep me honest:

Unless you really lay on the tribal signifiers, it’s hard to find a definition where most Democrats support cancel culture and most Republicans oppose it!

(the above poll probably overestimates support for cancel culture, because it talks about saying “things widely considered hateful” instead of, like, one tweet expressing a widely-shared opinion at the wrong time)

Liberals invent a fictional entity called “The Right”, which is full of all of the most racist and fascist things that NYT was ever able to produce an out-of-context quote showing one Claremont guy saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Right” because it’s an ontological threat against democracy, then rile up a mob against a Google guy who sends the wrong memo.

Likewise, conservatives invent a fictional entity called “The Left”, which is full of all the most horrible woke things that FOX was ever able to find one Gender Studies professor saying, then believe that any action is justified against “The Left” because it’s coming for our children, then rile up a mob against a Home Depot woman who makes a bad tweet.

4. Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough

I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same.

“If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!”

This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But:

• The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.

• Any rule of the form “Don’t do X, unless you can think up a big pile of negative adjectives to describe why the people you’re doing X to deserve it” will simply never prevent anyone from doing X, not even once.

5. Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire

Postcards From Barsoom helpfully includes a list of the cancellations he finds most enraging. I agree most of them are enraging.

But they’re not stories about Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Nick Fuentes. The median victim of cancel culture is some center-left college professor who sent out an email saying that he supports BLM but questions some of their tactics.

(I would add David Shor to the list as an especially revealing case, and Al Franken as an especially clear own-goal)

This is because you mostly get the critical mass necessary for cancellation in very leftist institutions, and most people in very leftist institutions are leftists.

There’s a deeper problem here where pre-emptive fear of cancellation blocked rightists from joining these institutions in the first place. But in terms of actual cancellations, they’re usually some poor shmuck who put too few exclamation points after “BLM!!!!”

Likewise, if there are right-wing cancellation squads, they won’t cancel Rachel Maddow or Kamala Harris. They’ll get some WSJ writer who puts too few exclamation points after “MAGA!!!!”

6. Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence

Cancellation isn’t just morally bad. It also screws over society. And it screws over your own institutions worst of all.

By society I mean: you want scientists to be producing good science, not producing the science least likely to get them cancelled. You want the Federal Reserve filled with the best economists, not the most politically pure economists. No matter how righteous your cause, if you cancel people who don’t agree with it, you end up with the kind of low-quality science and corrupt institutions we’ve grown used to recently. This is bad insofar as you care about things like truth, trust, or national flourishing.

But even if you don’t care about those things, remember that cancellation is mostly friendly fire. Cancellers can’t 100% control broader society, but they do control their own party and its organs. I think this is part of why the Democratic Party is floundering right now. At the risk of getting cancelled myself, it kind of seems like Democrats now wish they’d put a little more of thought into picking a popular/electable VP in 2020 instead of the most diversity-box-ticking person they could find on short notice. Why didn’t they? Well, would you, as a Democratic Party insider, want to speak out against Kamala Harris, in f**king 2020 of all years? Obviously anyone who tried that would have been cancelled. So nobody spoke out against the decision, they went ahead with it, and now they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.

You, too, can one day have a party this self-sabotaging and incapable of winning elections! All you need to do is adopt cancel culture!

(“But we would only apply it to actually bad things, not to people on our own side just trying to warn us”. I’m pretty sure the Democrats didn’t go into this expecting to punish people on their own side trying to warn them, yet here we are.)

7. No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision

I think the Democrats as a political party are massively underperforming their fundamentals.

They have most of the elites (elites, by definition, are powerful), most of the donor money, and their two main bases (college graduates and minorities) have both ballooned as a share of the population, while the Republicans’ (white people, rural people) are in decline. They control all the prestige media. Trump has no self-control and dozens of skeletons in his closet. How could they lose?

There are many factors - inflation, Afghanistan, the Electoral College - but part of the story has to be that wokeness and cancel culture are historically unpopular. They produced short-term gains (as people became afraid to speak out against them) but long-term disaster (as their extremism alienated friends and fired up enemies). This is still just my optimistic prediction. But if conservatives ever in fact take enough power that they can wield cancellation more effectively than the Democrats, then it will have been borne out.

In which case, you, too, will have the opportunity for short-term gains at the expense of alienating everybody with a backbone and/or conscience. What could possibly go wrong?

8. Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power

I can’t remember if this is on the Evil Overlord List, but it should be.

The right is still out of power. For one thing, Biden is still President. There’s even (according to betting markets) a 40% chance that the Dems win the next election.

(The argument in this paragraph isn’t original, but I lost the link to it): Consider an undecided voter in a swing state. As an independent, they’re probably on the right on some issues and on the left on others. Many of them are probably former liberals who left the fold because of wokeness and cancel culture. Now they check out what right-wingers have to offer, and it’s “We also love cancel culture, we plan to drop all of our principles as soon as we win, anyone with lefty opinions should be terrified.” Doesn’t sound like a great advertisement.

But also: even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives still won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government. Even if Trump wins, the median outcome of conservatives endorsing cancellation is that the few liberals in these institutions trying to restrain their worst tendencies get dismissed as useful idiots for conservatives who wouldn’t hesitate to cancel them if they were on the other side.

Why mention this? Because the people talking about cancellation insist they’re “just being strategic” and “just laser-focused on winning” when in fact writing the blog posts at all reveals they couldn’t care less about any of these considerations. It’s psychological re-enactment, plain and simple.

9. There’s Probably Other Options

“But we can’t just do nothing!”

Unfreedom of conscience, like famine and plague, has haunted us throughout history and will probably continue to do so. Still, I think the very-long-range trend for all three problems is down, and that hard work by good people can push that forward. This will look like boring incremental progress, ie the only thing that has ever worked. Here are some possible subtasks:

1. Politicians should dismantle the government apparatus propping up cancel culture. Certainly the sorts of things mentioned in the Twitter Files count here, but so do some of the civil rights stuff Richard Hanania talks about in Origins of Woke.

2. Academics should encourage their schools to adopt the Chicago Principles, and businesspeople should encourage their companies to become mission-focused in the style of Coinbase. Ideally these commitments would have legal force, letting students/stockholders sue for violations. Politicians should incentivize the institutions they influence (eg state universities, government contractors) to do this.

3. Tech companies should come up with better technologies for Internet moderation that help people avoid unproductive comments without letting moderators transition into ideological censors. I’ve written more about this here.

4. The most important job for bloggers and other public intellectuals in particular is figuring out what the heck we mean by cancel culture. The “bad” kinds of cancellation shade imperceptibly into things like social norms, petitions, and boycotts. Where do we draw the line? If there had never been cancel culture on the left, would it be acceptable for a Home Depot worker to tweet support for a would-be Presidential assassin? What if a comedian makes a joke that normalizes pedophilia? Part of the reason it’s so hard to get a strong anti-cancel-culture coalition is that most people want some things to be socially unacceptable and aren’t sure how to draw a bright line. I’m not saying you can’t be against cancel culture if you can’t define it - if you can be bad, you can also be good. I’m saying that defining it a little better is one of the intermediate steps in fighting it. I’ve tried to start this project here.

As an example of (4) - maybe we should respect in a firewall between people’s work identity and their political identity, unless the person deliberately lowers the firewall by using their work to promote their politics. So if a Home Depot worker says they hate Trump, they’re talking in their capacity as a normal human citizen and not a Home Depot worker, so it’s wrong to cancel them. If a journalist tweets from their official journalism account that they hate Trump, then it doesn’t really seem like there’s a firewall between their work and their politics anymore, and then maybe they’re fair game. I’m not personally suggesting this - I think even cancelling journalists isn’t great - but it’s one of the many principled things you could do if you felt like you really needed to revenge-cancel certain people but also wanted to have some principles and not become exactly what you hated.

The priests of Amun probably felt pretty great revenge-cancelling the priests of Aten after they regained power. But nobody remembers them today and they’re not part of the story of human progress. Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment to defuse the entire conflict from above, and everybody remembers them, and it actually made a long-term difference.

When you call the cops because you think someone has broken into your house, make sure you don't have any water boiling on the stove, because it could get you killed.

New court filing says that continued secrecy jeopardizes the Constitution’s separation of powers and protections of whistleblowers.

Californian thieves continue to wreak havoc on retailers in the socialist state, and it doesn't sound like it's going to get better any time soon.

Turns out you can never be woke enough.

Below is my column in Fox.com on renewed attacks on free speech and the apologists for this anti-free speech movement, including most recently comedian Jon Stewart. From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, the left is pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.

Here is the column:

Agency defends practice as lawful, emphasizes ex-employees still subject to 'certain restrictions under the ethics law.' FDA brass already promotes jabs with claims vaccine makers aren't allowed to make.

Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.

Little Tech has run independent of politics for our entire careers. But, as the old Soviet joke goes, “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

We believe bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech.

We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

The time has come to stand up for Little Tech.

Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech. We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech. But we will fight for Little Tech – for the freedom to research, to invent, to create jobs, to build the future – with all of our resources.

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

• Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

• Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

• Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.

We are in this for the long haul.

America

America led the 20th Century because we are preeminent in three dimensions:

1. Technology – America drove the Second Industrial Revolution through the 1930’s, and then the Computer Revolution since the 1940’s.

2. Economy – America’s free market system created enormous societal wealth and dramatic improvements in quality of life for everyday people.

3. Military – American military might drove victory in World War I and World War II, and then catalyzed the unilateral surrender and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Each of these dimensions reinforces the other two:

• Our technology preeminence powers our economy and our military.

• Our economic growth pays for our massive investment in technology and in our military.

• And our military dominance keeps us safe from foreign threats and hostile ideologies that could crush our technology, our economy, and our people.

And, America’s success has positive global spillover effects to much of the rest of the world. American technology is the global standard. The American economy is the leading production and consumption partner of many other nations. And the American military has maintained overall global peace and prosperity since World War II to a level unprecedented in world history.

Naysayers say America’s best days are behind us, that the 21st Century will see America play a diminished role in all three dimensions.

We disagree.

There is no reason American technology, economic, and military leadership cannot continue for decades to come.

There is no reason the 21st Century cannot be a Second American Century.

Startups

American technology leadership is the result of a complex system built over the last 150 years that includes our pioneering spirit, our work ethic, our rule of law, our deep capital markets, our higher education system, and long term government investment in scientific research. And university, government, and corporate labs have all played key roles.

But the vanguard of American technology supremacy has always been the startup. From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.

A startup is what happens when a plucky group of outcasts and misfits comes together with a dream, ambition, courage, and a particular set of skills – to build something new in the world, to build a product that will improve peoples’ lives, and to build a company that may go on to create many more new things in the future.

The enormous advantage of any startup is a clean sheet of paper – a single shot to imagine and realize a different and better world.

But startups start with every other disadvantage. Specifically, they must go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength – incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.

Incumbents often have another enormous advantage – the ability to wire the government against startup competitors.

Dominant companies don’t start out that way. In fact, they start as startups, fighting their way uphill until they reach a position of power where they seek to lock in their gains, to pull the rope ladder up behind them. They inject themselves into the political system and seek regulatory capture – a wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions, and that new startups cannot possibly scale.

The historical result of regulatory capture in market after market has been government-enforced monopolies and cartels.

And the motto of every monopoly and cartel is, “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.”

When this cycle is allowed to play out, when big companies can weaponize the government against startups, the result is stagnation and then decline.

There are many signs of stagnation and decline in the American economy today.

Economists measure the rate of technology improvement in the economy as productivity growth. And productivity growth today, after 50 years of the proliferation of the profoundly powerful technologies of the computer and the Internet, is lower than before the 1970’s.

The real world consequences are staggering:

• Low productivity growth means low economic growth.

• Low economic growth means a low rate of improvement in quality of life for regular people, if not outright backsliding. See, for example, skyrocketing prices and stagnating quality of education, health care, and housing – sure signs of regulatory capture.

• Low economic growth also means the rise of smashmouth zero-sum politics, as gains for one group of people necessarily require taking things away from other people.

• Zero-sum politics lead to corrosion of the national spirit of opportunity and growth. We can feel this corrosion all around us.

The way to prevent this outcome is to encourage new startups – to drive innovation, competition, and growth – and to prevent big companies from weaponizing the government to crush them.

Problem

The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be.

For example:

• Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

• Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

• Regulatory agencies are applying direct pressure to banks to cut off disfavored startups and founders from the financial system.

• Regulatory agencies are punitively blocking startups from being acquired by the same big companies the government is preferencing in so many other ways.

• The federal government as a customer in critical sectors like defense and intelligence is more wired than ever to favor big incumbents over innovative startups.

• And, the government is currently proposing a tax on unrealized capital gains, which would absolutely kill both startups and the venture capital industry that funds them.

The anti-startup bias that is increasingly pervasive across the American government is a clear and present threat to the health and vitality of American technology success – and therefore to the American economy, the American military, and the American people.

Why is this happening? In part, explicit decisions. In part, inertial drift. But also because tech startups as an industry do not show up in Washington DC and in the political system the way big companies do. As long as this imbalance persists, the war on tech startups and the resulting threat to America will continue.

Therefore the need to politically defend Little Tech.

Opportunity

Reversing ruinous policies is just one side of the coin. We can also imagine positive policies that encourage tech startups to flourish – benefiting those startups and their customers, and forcing big incumbents to stay vital and dynamic due to startup competition.

For example:

• Regulatory reform in important industries like health care, education, and housing, to strip incumbents of their current regulatory capture and drive higher quality at lower prices.

• Policies to reconstruct the American manufacturing sector around automation and AI, reshoring entire industries and creating millions of new middle class jobs.

• Reinvention of the American military industrial base by new companies building defense systems on the leading edge of autonomy and AI.

• Environmental reform to encourage the development and deployment of nuclear power for unlimited clean energy production.

• Expansion of high-skilled immigration to encourage foreign graduates of American universities and others to build new companies and industries here.

• And, a whole-of-government program to drive the success of US technology companies globally, against a hostile China and a regulation-crazed EU.

We have no doubt that an American government that actually wants startups to succeed and new industries to flourish would drive enormous increases in the standard of living of regular Americans, and underwrite many more decades of American technology, economic, and military strength.

The glory of a Second American Century is within our reach.

Let’s grasp it.

For every dollar that was received by oil and gas industry groups and climate-skeptical conservative and libertarian nonprofits, $9.60 went to nonprofits that fight against the use of oil, gas and coal.

ER doctor Kendall Conger objected to Duke Health "acting politically under the guise of medical science" and shared administrator's email admitting no clinical evidence backs its pledge against "racism, bias, and hate."