Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Editors’ Note: Today is the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump. The essay below states well the critical and much needed directional change ahead for the United States. The history and dangers of the ‘liberal order’, the ‘open society’ and the dissolving societal norms and character of America away from its Judeo-Christian founding are well acknowledged by the author. The 2024 election has defined the judgement of American citizens that a historic change in the direction in how America functions is needed. So much has been providential in bringing Donald Trump back to the office of President. Marco Rubio is a superb choice for the Secretary of State to affect the directional and essential changes in U.S. foreign policy to ensure the survival and strengthening of the greatest nation on earth. In a few words, this means to “Make America Great Again”.

It’s long past time to reconsider our suicidal obsession with an open society and recognize that America is more than just an idea.

Dring his confirmation hearing for secretary of state on Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., leveled a searing critique of the postwar international order and the globalist ideology that sustains it. For generations, that ideology has dominated the corridors of power in Washington and guided American foreign policy almost without question. It has not served us well, and it’s long past time to discard it.

Rubio took direct aim at the postwar liberal order in his opening statement, signaling a major shift in American foreign policy under a second Trump administration. In Rubio’s telling, repudiating postwar globalism means a return of American foreign policy based on the American national interest, a recovery of our American identity, and a recognition that our national interests are not always going to be aligned with the interests of the so-called “international community” or global corporations.

It was a “dangerous delusion,” said Rubio, to think that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history and “that all the nations of the world would now become members of the democratic western-led community, that a foreign policy that served the national interest could now be replaced by one that served the liberal world order, and that all mankind was now destined to abandon national sovereignty and national identity and would instead become one human family, and citizens of the world.”

The hallmarks of this delusional ideology, Rubio went on, included “an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade,” which was pursued at the expense of our national economy. It also included “an irrational zeal for maximum freedom of movement of people,” which has caused a “mass migration crisis.” (Note that Rubio doesn’t qualify or limit this merely to “illegal immigration.”)

These twin pillars of the postwar liberal order, free trade and open borders, are the logical policy endpoints of the globalist ideology that first gained traction in the aftermath of World War Two and were adopted without question at the end of the Cold War. Where did this ideology come from though, and why has it been so thoroughly embraced for so long?

One of the major architects of it was Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher who during World War Two wrote The Open Society And Its Enemies, a major philosophical work which would prove massively influential in the decades after its publication in 1945. Popper believed the fascist regimes responsible for the Second World War arose from what he called the authoritarian personality, which produced a tribal or “closed society,” marked above all by deference to authority and subordination of the individual to the collective. Such societies tend to be nationalistic, authoritarian or totalitarian, and committed to concrete ideas about transcendent or metaphysical truth.

The task facing the world in the aftermath of World War Two and the horrors of Auschwitz, wrote Popper, was to ensure that nothing like that could ever happen again. The only way to do that, he argued, was to banish the closed society altogether, reject transcendence, embrace disenchantment, and pursue a radically open society. Popper was a philosopher of science, and wrote in a formal, academic style, but his anti-metaphysical ideas translated to a politics of openness and a society in which everything was open to critical questioning and empirical falsification. Nothing was really true, in other words, except the need for openness and a rejection of what R.R. Reno has called “the strong gods” of national identity, religion, and transcendence. Popper thought we must define for ourselves the truths we need, even truth about reality itself: “Facts as such have no meaning; they gain it only through our decisions.”

In his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, Reno argues that Popper’s influence on the postwar liberal order cannot be overstated — and that’s a big problem for us today. The danger of an open society is that at some point it begins to come apart. If nothing binds a nation together, it cannot cohere, and will eventually collapse.

Today we aren’t facing the war-ravaged world that Popper was, but one that has been dangerously weakened by the open society ideology that he espoused. “Our problems are the opposite of those faced by the men who went to war to defeat Hitler,” writes Reno. “We are imperiled by a spiritual vacuum and the apathy it brings. The political culture of the West has become politically inert, winnowed down to technocratic management of private utilities and personal freedoms. Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one.”

This is what Rubio was getting at in his opening statement, and it’s a theme that’s been running right through the heart of our political discourse since Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015. Are we going to be an endlessly open society, committed only to open borders and free trade, with no sense of national solidarity or loyalty to the American nation and people? Or are we going to rediscover what the West cast aside after World War Two, and embrace again the loyalties and truth-claims that enable a nation and a people to cohere and pursue their collective interests over and against those of other nations?

To be sure, Rubio and Trump and the entire populist MAGA movement stand in contrast to a bipartisan consensus that has ruled in Washington for many decades now. In his televised address on Wednesday, President Joe Biden repeatedly referred to America as an idea. It’s a familiar claim, that America is based on the universal proposition that all men are created equal, therefore anyone who accepts the proposition can become an American.

But the limits of this claim should by now be obvious. America is more than an idea, it is a people bound together by a shared past and a common future. We have a distinct language, culture, and way of life. We are also not, as Elon Musk thinks, simply an indifferent meritocracy derived from a proposition of human equality. Much of Asia is also a meritocracy, and no one mistakes it for America.

Indeed, the proposition of human equality at the heart of our nation is above all a religious claim, specifically a Christian one. We have to understand “America as an idea” in that context. If America is an idea, the idea is not some version of the radical individualism and anti-metaphysics of Karl Popper, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the inheritance of Christian Europe. Put another way, the idea is western civilization itself, formed and sustained by Christian claims about God and man.

In concrete policy terms, a rejection of the postwar liberal order and a return to a politics of national solidarity will mean turning away from unfettered global free trade that benefits multinational corporations at the expense of America’s working families. It will mean rejecting mass immigration — legal and illegal — and recognizing that open borders are a force for destabilization and social chaos. And on the world stage it will mean recognizing that America’s national interests are not always served by deference to international bodies, corporate profits, and a rising GDP.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes

House investigations reveal that the Deep State and the Biden-Harris Administration are engaged in a massive repression of American freedoms.

Reports released by two House committees in December shine a harsh light on the deceptions and oppressive tactics utilized by numerous federal agencies, the Intelligence Community, and leaders of the Democratic Party. During the last year of the first Trump Administration, agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), State Department, and Justice Department (DOJ) initiated improper contacts with media in an effort to censor conservative views. These agencies also took steps to interfere in the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden.

The Biden-Harris Administration supercharged the weaponization of the federal government against the American people. With the active participation of the media, the administration followed a whole-of-government effort to collude with, and coerce, the media to suppress and censor conservatives and others who opposed progressive goals. It threatened parents with terrorist “threat tagging” and visits from the FBI for speaking their minds, stretched statutory authority beyond recognition to prosecute Donald Trump and his supporters, harassed and penalized whistleblowers, invaded bank privacy, sent heavily armed federal agents into private homes, and brought an unprecedented barrage of litigation against states to force them into compliance with the administration’s unconstitutional goals.

On December 17, 2024, the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight (Administration Subcommittee) released its report on the events surrounding January 6, 2021 and the politicization of the Select Committee (January 6 Committee) established by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate those events. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (Justice Subcommittee) released a 17,000-page final report detailing the administrative state’s and the Biden-Harris Administration’s repressive censorship enterprise and other abuses.

Based on the evidence described in these reports, there are two inescapable conclusions: (1) regardless of the administration in office, the Deep State in DHS, DoD, DOJ, IRS, the Intelligence Community, and other agencies have arrogated to themselves unconstitutional and unlawful powers to infringe individual liberties, expand rules, and use force to suppress conservatives’ goals, religion, and free speech; and (2) the Biden-Harris Administration, Pelosi, and leading Democrats endorsed, supported, facilitated, and led the expansion of these efforts.

These reports are products of extensive investigations and include copious evidence. Though the Administration Subcommittee’s report can be faulted for its angry tone, a vainglorious pandering to its chairman, Barry Loudermilk, and sometimes hyperbolic conclusions, it provides compelling evidence of wrongdoing. Broader in scope and more thoroughly researched, the Justice Subcommittee’s report is the product of a detailed inquiry into a broad betrayal of trust. Justice Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan is to be commended for uncovering problems and taking steps that have already ameliorated some of these practices.

The findings in these reports show why the Trump Administration must clean house. That is why Trump has nominated sometimes controversial individuals such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, John Ratcliffe, Russell Vought, and Rick Grenell. It explains Trump’s impulsive, properly withdrawn nomination of Matt Gaetz and the creation of DOGE as an advisor outside of government. It is why so many of Trump’s appointees have expressed concern about the agencies they have been selected to lead.

Above all, the administration must not redirect targeting—it must eradicate these stains on the American soul.

An Illegitimate, Rigged Show Trial

I believe Donald Trump erred by holding his “Save America” rally in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, separating his call for a peaceful march by 8,500 words words from his peroration, in which he implored the crowd to “fight like hell,” and his dilatory public response to the ensuing violence. I condemn the demonstrators who entered the Capitol or resisted orders to disperse.

Nonetheless, the exaggerated, partisan accounts of that day, invective used by Democratic leaders and the media for political advantage, and the unjustifiable divergence between the fierce overcharging of those with even a scintilla of connection to the January 6 events and the near indifference to the violent left-wing rioters who, following George Floyd’s death, killed or injured hundreds of Americans, burned down billions of dollars of private property, destroyed police stations, occupied cities, and laid a sustained siege to the federal courthouse in Portland, is inexcusable.

The evidence shows that from the outset, the January 6 Committee was rigged to condemn President Trump and lay the foundation for Congress or the courts to reach a finding that he was guilty of insurrection, thereby triggering grounds for prohibiting him from again serving as president under the 14th Amendment. To achieve this result, the January 6 Committee was organized in violation of House rules, and was selective in pursuing its mandate, parsing its evidence, and writing its report. It stage-managed its public hearings and then covered up its wrongdoing by deleting, withholding, and encrypting its files.

On June 30, 2021, the House passed H.R. 503, establishing the January 6 Committee to investigate the “facts, circumstances, and causes” of January 6, and the “preparedness and response” of law enforcement. It included an exemption to House Rule 11 that gave the Committee’s chairman the power to greatly limit questions from the Republicans who would be appointed to the Committee.

Furthermore, House Rule 10, Clause 5 requires that the members of standing committees be elected “from nomination[s] submitted by the respective party caucus or conference.” Speaker Pelosi named seven Democrats and one Republican—Liz Cheney. Two of those Democrats, Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff, previously served as impeachment managers against President Trump. Prior to being selected, Cheney pledged, “I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proposed five Republicans, but in an unprecedented violation of House rules, Pelosi rejected his nominees. She then named Republican Adam Kinzinger as the final member of the January 6 Committee.

Even with the exclusion of Rule 11, H.R. 503 still required Chairman Bennie Thompson to consult with the Republican ranking member before issuing subpoenas or ordering depositions. House rules require each of the party caucuses to select its ranking members. Because Pelosi excluded Republican nominees, there was no Republican ranking member (though the committee pretended that Cheney served that function). Some of those subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee challenged the subpoenas on this basis, but the courts deferred to Congress.

All committee chairs have the responsibility to archive committee records with the Clerk of the House, who subsequently stores those records with the National Archives and Records Administration. H.R. 503 further requires that all January 6 Committee records be transferred to any committee designated by the Speaker; Pelosi designated the Committee on House Administration.

The January 6 Committee failed to archive or provide the Administration Subcommittee with video recordings of witness interviews, as many as 900 interview summaries or transcripts, and more than one terabyte of digital data. The January 6 Committee also delivered more than 100 encrypted, password protected documents for which it never provided the passwords.

Once underway, the January 6 Committee focused on hyping the horrors of January 6 and assigning blame to Trump. It generally ignored its mandate to investigate preparedness and the response, because that would have established that Trump authorized and directed 10,000 National Guard soldiers to be available to ensure security and safety, and that Pelosi declined that assistance. Because there were no Republican-selected members on the January 6 Committee, there were no cross-examinations, witnesses called, or evidence reviewed at the behest of Republican-selected members.

Every investigatory committee hopes for its John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel who testified about his first-hand knowledge as a participant in the cover-up of the Watergate break in. The January 6 Committee’s pale substitute was Cassidy Hutchinson, the then-24-year-old Coordinator for Legislative Affairs for White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson testified about things she claims to have been told and about a letter she claims to have transcribed, but which the evidence suggests never happened.

Following her second uneventful interview with January 6 Committee staff, Hutchinson drastically switched her narrative and began testifying to a variety of unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claims. It is not clear why she did so, but the Administration Subcommittee uncovered evidence of secret conversations between Hutchinson, former White House employee Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host of ABC’s The View, and Liz Cheney. Cheney improperly influenced Hutchinson to fire her attorney and referred her to a number of new attorneys, including a lawyer from the multinational law firm Alston & Bird whom Hutchinson then retained.

Based on hearsay, Hutchinson claimed that Trump had lunged toward the Secret Service driver of his car after his request to go to the Capitol was denied. Trump, the individual Hutchinson claimed gave her the information, and the agents with Trump that day have denied her claim. But after her third interview and retaining the Alston lawyer, Hutchinson suddenly recalled that she heard White House employees saying that Trump had agreed that Pence should be hung. Though there is no corroboration of this allegation, the January 6 Committee featured it throughout its hearings and in its report.

Hutchinson also claimed that she transcribed a note from Meadows, and edited by White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, that conceded that anyone who entered the Capitol without authority had acted illegally. The Administration Subcommittee retained an independent certified handwriting expert who said that Hutchinson’s story is false. Herschmann denies the note is genuine.

The Administration Subcommittee refers to Cheney’s actions as “witness tampering” and recommends a criminal referral and, implicitly, bar discipline. That goes too far by criminalizing common misbehavior; it may be emotionally satisfying, but it will not improve American government.

In 2022, HBO released Pelosi in the House, a documentary directed and produced by Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter. It includes footage of Pelosi and members of House and Senate leadership after being evacuated from the Capitol on January 6. The January 6 Committee was in possession of the footage throughout is investigation, but did not publish or archive it.

In one clip, Pelosi admits to her Chief of Staff, Terri McCullough, that they bear responsibility for the lack of security at the Capitol. Discussing her failure to call up the National Guard, Pelosi states, “I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”

The Administration Subcommittee also uncovered evidence that senior Defense Department (DoD) officials intentionally delayed deploying the National Guard to the Capitol, despite Trump’s contrary directions. According to interviews conducted by the DoD Inspector General, during a January 3, 2021 meeting that included Trump, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Trump warned about the large number of protestors expected on January 6 and authorized 10,000 soldiers or National Guard to “make sure it’s a safe event.” Miller promised that there was a plan to do so. Milley further testified to the Inspector General that Trump ordered DoD to use all assets necessary to guarantee the safety of everyone in Washington, D.C. on January 6.

The Administration Subcommittee concluded that in the course of the investigation by the January 6 Committee, DoD and the Biden-Harris Administration possessed information that the Secretary of the Army misled senior congressional leaders by stating that the D.C. National Guard was “on the way” at a time it was not.

It appears that the Biden-Harris Administration, including DoD and the January 6 Committee, colluded to omit from the investigation and its report exculpatory information that would have shown that President Trump attempted to work with DoD and the National Guard to ensure the security of the Capitol at the time of his planned rally on January 6.

Oddly unmentioned in the Subcommittee’s report is that Trump advisors Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon were prosecuted and sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to testify before the January 6 committee—the first former White House official to be imprisoned for a contempt of Congress conviction and the first time in 65 years that anyone has been prosecuted for refusing to testify before a House committee. That last time, and each of the ten times before then, the individuals who were imprisoned refused to testify before the reviled, highly partisan House Un-American Activities Committee.

The Administration Subcommittee’s report shows that the events of January 6 were preventable, and that Trump’s speech that day would not have resulted in a riot, or at the least the riot would not have penetrated the Capitol, if Democratic leadership had accepted assistance offered by the president or if DoD had mobilized the National Guard sooner.

While Trump is not without blame for the events of January 6, the January 6 Committee was an undemocratic, rigged, partisan show trial akin to Soviet and Chinese trials that are staged to justify a result rather than find the truth.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s Censorship Complex

The Justice Subcommittee obtained internal communications from social media platforms, Amazon, and others in which executives of these companies attribute suppressing and censoring videos, posts, and other content to “pressure” from the Biden-Harris Administration. For example, on the administration’s third day, the White House emailed Twitter (now X) to demand that a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be “removed ASAP.”

Previously unknown is that under intense pressure from the White House, Amazon also suppressed placement and promotion of certain books critical of the administration.

The Justice Subcommittee report concluded that: (1) Big Tech changed its content moderation policies because of pressure from the Biden-Harris White House; (2) the censorship campaign targeted not just falsehoods but also true information, satire, and other content, including Americans’ personal experiences; (3) the censorship campaign had a chilling effect on other speech; (4) the Biden-Harris White House had leverage because of its power over policies that affected media companies; and (5) the Biden-Harris White House pushed censorship of books, not just social media.

The Biden-Harris censorship enterprise had its origins in the Obama and Trump Administrations. Following the 2016 election, offices within the executive branch began efforts to covertly censor Americans’ free expression. The FBI formed the Foreign Influence Task Force in the fall of 2017. The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department established by President Obama in early 2016 to counter terrorism, expanded its mandate in 2017 to include countering foreign disinformation, and later also domestic speech (the GEC was closed down on December 23, 2024 when Congress refused to continue its funding). The DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) formed the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force in 2018, which evolved under Biden into the “Mis, Dis, and Malinformation Team” (MDM) in 2021 to counter foreign and American speech.

Once the Biden-Harris Administration took office, these censorship efforts expanded. Senior members of the Biden-Harris White House immediately began a months-long pressure campaign on Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and other companies to censor views disfavored by the Biden-Harris Administration. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence created the Foreign Malign Influence Center in 2021. DHS created the Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board in May 2022, soon disbanded following broad condemnation. CISA also built out and met with its MDM Advisory Subcommittee throughout 2022.

Even during the Trump Administration, key activities of this censorship complex involved “inoculating” the public against damaging stories about Biden family influence peddling and taking other steps to bolster Joe Biden’s candidacy against Trump.

Foreign Censorship

The Justice Subcommittee demonstrated that the threat to Americans’ free speech increasingly includes foreign governments, including Brazil, the European Union, and Australia, but that the Biden-Harris Administration failed to defend Americans’ rights. For example, the Justice Subcommittee determined that in 2022, the FBI facilitated censorship requests to American social media companies on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), a Ukrainian intelligence agency then infiltrated by Russian security services. The SBU transmitted to the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation.” The FBI requested—and, in some cases, directed—the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online, including a verified State Department account and accounts belonging to American journalists.

The Biden-Harris Administration also failed to protect Americans confronting censorship outside the United Sates. In Brazil, Justice Alexandre de Moraes forced American companies such as X and Rumble to cease operations in Brazil after they refused to comply with his illegal censorship orders. A European bureaucrat threatened American companies with retaliation under European law for facilitating political discourse in the United States. Australia considered legislation that purported to censor online speech globally. The Justice Subcommittee report observed that the Biden-Harris Administration refused to take a leadership role opposing these efforts. Likely that is because multiple Biden-Harris officials, including Harris and former climate czar John Kerry, have characterized the First Amendment as an obstacle rather than an essential right (see here, here, and here).

Artificial Intelligence

The Justice Subcommittee also uncovered strong evidence that the Biden-Harris Administration covertly tried to coerce AI companies by pressuring developers to censor new models, funding the development of AI-powered censorship tools, and collaborating with censorious foreign nations on AI regulations. The Justice Subcommittee identified examples of the Biden-Harris Administration funding the development of both AI-powered censorship tools and pressing tech companies to selectively exclude disfavored information when training generative AI in order to bias or censor responses.

With regard to potential AI legislation, the Justice Subcommittee report recommends that Congress follow four principles to protect Americans’ right to free expression: (1) ensure the federal government is involved in private AI algorithm or dataset decisions; (2) ban funding of censorship related research; (3) end foreign collaboration on AI regulations involving the censorship of lawful speech; and (4) avoid AI regulation that gives the government coercive leverage.

Non-Governmental Proxies

The Justice Subcommittee described how the federal government colluded with private and academic institutions to target and censor Americans’ speech, including (1) how CISA used proxies and partners to target and censor Americans’ election-related speech; and (2) how the National Science Foundation funded and supported the development of AI-powered tools that would supercharge the government’s ability to censor disfavored speech.

The most notable effort to cover up government censorship efforts was CISA’s (and later GEC’s) partnership with Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was launched in 2020 during the Trump Administration. Instead of focusing on legitimate cybersecurity threats, EIP focused on so-called misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and mutated into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance activities.

On November 10, 2021, CISA director Jen Easterly gave a speech in which she asserted that CISA is in the business of protecting infrastructure, and “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.” She went on to say that Americans should not be free to determine the truth.

Under Easterly’s tenure, CISA (1) worked with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation; (2) considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the country; (3) moved its censorship operation to the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), a CISA-funded non-profit, after Missouri and Louisiana, along with several other plaintiffs, sued CISA and the Biden-Harris Administration; and (4) used the same CISA-funded non-profit as its spokesperson to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.” Members of CISA’s advisory committee internally worried that it was “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”

In a draft of its 2022 recommendations, a CISA subcommittee recommended that it step up the use of outside organizations in performing its functions, which increasingly focused on censoring Americans. Though correctly warned by CIA legal counsel that “the government cannot ask an outside party to do something the Intelligence Community cannot do,” CISA disregarded that advice to bypass the First Amendment and “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

One method CISA used to censor Americans is called “Switchboarding.” This is the federal government’s practice of referring requests for the removal of content on social media from generally Democratic state and local election officials to the relevant platforms. For the 2022 election cycle, CISA transferred this function to EI-ISAC. The FBI was often copied or referenced in requests to suppress or remove content, signaling that it would take action if the request was not acted upon.

CISA claimed that its mission did not include censoring “content that is polarizing, biased, partisan or contains viewpoints expressed about elections or politics,” “inaccurate statements about an elected or appointed official, candidate, or political party,” or “broad, non-specific statements about the integrity of elections or civic processes that do not reference a specific current election administration activity.” But in practice, state and local election officials used the CISA-funded EI-ISAC to silence excluded criticism and political dissent.

For example, in August 2022 a Democratic government official in Loudoun County, Virginia, reported a Tweet featuring an unedited video of a county official, “because it was posted as part of a larger campaign to discredit the word of” that official regarding Loudon County’s on-going dispute about the use of Critical Race Theory in county schools. EI-ISAC sought to assist that county official, demonstrating that her “misinformation report” was nothing more than a politically motivated censorship attempt.

Following increased public awareness of CISA’s role in government-induced censorship, and the Justice Subcommittee’s issuance of subpoenas to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta in February 2023, CISA scrubbed its website of references to domestic MDM. Prior to the cleansing, the domain “CISA.gov/mdm” was associated with a webpage titled “Mis, Dis, Malinformation,” which included an overview of CISA’s efforts to censor foreign and domestic actors.

The Biden Justice Department led efforts to stall compliance by CISA and its private partners with Justice Subcommittee subpoenas.

Election Interference Operations

The Justice Subcommittee found extensive evidence of a concerted campaign by the FBI to preemptively debunk—or “prebunk”—allegations about the Biden family’s influence peddling scheme in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Starting prior to the New York Post’s October 14, 2020 report about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, this campaign—during Trump’s first term—included warning social media platforms about a pre-election Russian influence operation relating to Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian company Burisma. As a result, many social media platforms adopted policies that suppressed or banned coverage of the Post’s story as a potential Russian hack-and-leak operation.

The FBI had been in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop since late 2019, and used it in one or more investigations in 2020. It knew the laptop was real and that its contents were authentic, but did not correct the false justifications for censoring the Post’s story.

Even after social media companies stopped censoring the stories, 51 former intelligence community officials, using their official titles and citing their national security credentials, released a public statement suggesting that the story “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The Justice Subcommittee obtained communications among signers, however, that established that many doubted the laptop was in fact Russian disinformation. The Justice Subcommittee investigation revealed that the public statement was politically motivated from the start. As former CIA Director Michael Morell testified, it was designed to “help Vice President Biden” in his presidential campaign.

As the emails soliciting signatures made clear, “We think Trump will attack Biden on the issue at this week’s debate,” and “we want to give the [Vice President] a talking point to use in response.” The Justice Committee’s interim report detailed how Morell spearheaded the statement after receiving a call from then-campaign advisor, and later Biden Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. The Biden campaign coordinated the statement’s dissemination to the media.

Nonetheless, in their public statements, interviews, and communications, the signers did not correct Politico, MSNBC, or other media that reported the statement as establishing the laptop was Russian disinformation, or proactively seek to correct that perception. Rather, the Intelligence Community worked to diminish the reach of stories that could be seen as harmful to Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

A report issued jointly by the Justice Subcommittee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence detailed previously nonpublic information that CIA officials, including Trump CIA Director Gina Haspel, were aware of the statement before its publication. In fact, some of the signatories, including Morell, were under contract with the CIA at or about the time of its publication and had access to confidential information that discredited the letter’s purpose.

In a debate with Trump on October 22, 2020, Biden referred to the statement as proof that the laptop was a Russian hoax, and that Trump’s attacks were “garbage.” Numerous signers lauded Biden’s use of their statement in their internal communications.

A book written by Andy Slavitt, a senior advisor to Biden who was deeply involved in the censorship enterprise, criticized Americans who disagreed with the administration’s overriding the Constitution as an “obsession with individual liberties.”

Weaponizing Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Against Americans

The FBI leadership’s trend toward political partisanship in recent years has disturbed the ranks of front-line FBI agents. FBI whistleblowers disclosed examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Bureau. They characterized the FBI leadership as “cancerous,” “enveloped in politicization and weaponization,” “rotted at its core,” and having a “systemic culture of unaccountability.”

According to the Justice Subcommittee, the FBI brutally retaliated against many of them for breaking ranks—suspending them without pay, preventing them from seeking outside employment, and purging suspected disloyal employees. The FBI also abused its security clearance adjudication process to target whistleblowers. Under pressure from the Justice Subcommittee, the FBI reinstated the clearance of at least one decorated FBI employee.

During the Biden-Harris Administration, the Justice Department and FBI advanced a two-tiered system of justice—investigating and prosecuting individuals or groups with disfavored views. Documents received pursuant to the Justice Subcommittee’s subpoenas show that the FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists. It targeted its employees who hold conservative views, investigated parents at school board meetings, and sought to invade Catholic churches in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism.” The IRS, Treasury Department, and other Justice Department agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), misused federal funds to target Americans.

Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of the Justice Department leadership’s disdain for American people than a memorandum issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland on October 4, 2021 to the FBI director and all U.S. attorneys that instructed them to develop strategies to investigate parents who voiced objections at school board meetings. The Justice Department’s documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive. Rather, the administration’s goal was to silence critics of its radical education policies and neutralize an issue that was threatening Democratic Party prospects in the close gubernatorial race in Virginia.

In response to the Justice Subcommittee’s subpoena, the FBI acknowledged for the first time that, following Garland’s directive, it opened 25 “Guardian assessments” of school board threats, and that six of these investigations were run by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. According to the FBI, none of these investigations resulted in federal arrests or charges, highlighting the political motives behind the actions.

Under Biden and Garland, the ATF issued a rule to drastically expand the number of Americans who would require a license to deal in firearms. A federal district court judge issued temporary restraining orders prohibiting enforcement of that rule pending a decision in the case. To send a message, a large contingent of heavily armed ATF agents executed a pre-dawn raid of alleged dealer Bryan Malinowski that left him dead. The raid is reminiscent of the FBI’s similar raid against pro-life activist Mark Houk, who was later acquitted of all charges.

In 2022, Congress appropriated $78.9 billion in new funding to the IRS, including $45 billion to hire as many as 87,000 agents. Following approximately a nine month investigation, the Justice Subcommittee cited evidence that the IRS had weaponized unannounced visits against the administration’s political foes, including an unannounced field visit to the home of journalist Matt Taibbi the very day he testified before Congress about government abuse. Though neither Taibbi nor his accountant had ever received a notice from the IRS about an issue with his tax returns, the IRS had opened a case against Taibbi on Christmas Eve—a Saturday—three weeks after he began reporting on government censorship involving Twitter. Taibbi owed no taxes; in fact, the IRS owed Taibbi a substantial refund.

Pressure and oversight about abusive field visits led the IRS to prohibit unannounced field visits to taxpayers’ homes.

The Justice Subcommittee also found that the Justice Department attempted to access private communications from members of Congress and congressional staff involved in conducting oversight of the Department.

Weaponizing Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans

The Justice Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views.

While the FBI claims it “does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs of the subject involved,” an FBI-wide memorandum originating from its Richmond Field Office did just that. Under the guise of tackling the threat of domestic terrorism, the memorandum painted certain “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of “threat mitigation.”

The Justice Subcommittee’s investigation began in February 2023 after a whistleblower revealed the existence of an anti-Catholic memorandum in internal FBI systems. FBI employees could not define the meaning of “radical-traditionalist Catholic” when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum. Nevertheless, this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide warning about the dangers of “radical” Catholics.

From witness testimony and FBI internal documents, the Justice Subcommittee learned that there were errors at every step of the memorandum’s drafting, review, approval, and removal process. For example, the two FBI employees who co-authored the memorandum told FBI internal investigators that they knew the sources cited in the memorandum, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and The Atlantic, had a political bias.

Coordinating with Financial Institutions to Surveil Americans

The Justice Subcommittee’s investigation revealed that federal law enforcement has virtually unchecked access to private financial data, is testing out new methods and technology to embed financial surveillance into the American financial framework, and has deputized the financial sector as an investigative arm (see here and here).

The Bank Secrecy Act authorizes the Treasury Department to impose reporting obligations on businesses and financial institutions, including Currency Transaction Reports for any individual involved in any transaction of over $10,000 and a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) when it identifies a “suspicious transaction relevant to a possible violation of law or regulation.” Documents received by the Justice Subcommittee from at least 17 entities, including banks, crowdfunding sites, money service businesses, and the Treasury Department, show that the FBI has manipulated this process by encouraging banks to file SARs based on names and selectors provided by the FBI. The fact that a SAR has been filed is not disclosed to customers.

The FBI developed typologies that target Americans with conservative views, including gun owners, those concerned with illegal immigration, and those opposed to COVID mandates. Other criteria used for these warrantless searches of financial records include contributions to conservative organizations, including leading legal organizations that defend religious and conservative views such as Alliance Defending Freedom. The FBI also uses search terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP” and has treated purchases of religious texts or firearms as indicators of “extremism.”

The Justice Subcommittee discovered that financial institutions confidentially report millions of Americans’ transactions to the federal government and that at least 25,000 government officials have access to search and download Americans’ financial information from government repositories without a warrant.

Weaponizing the FTC Against Elon Musk

The announcement of Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter generated an enormous backlash among elected officials and activists on the Left, some of whom called for the federal government to “block” the purchase.

On April 25, 2022, Twitter accepted Musk’s offer. Three days later, an attorney for Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan sent an email to the other commissioners requesting that they vote the following day to approve a previously negotiated consent decree with Twitter that included additional privacy and security protections. Prior to this email, Khan had not circulated a copy of the consent decree or FTC staff recommendations to the Republican commissioners—despite having substantially completed the decree a year earlier. In addition, despite repeated requests, FTC staff had not briefed the Republican commissioners about the proposal. In rushing to a vote, Khan ignored the traditional three-week notice period used by commissioners to study proposals.

Following the closing of the acquisition, Democrats in Washington stepped up their pressure campaign. Seven Democratic senators issued a joint press release calling for the FTC to investigate Musk’s so-called “alarming steps” at Twitter. They demanded that the FTC “vigorously oversee its consent decree” with Twitter, and outlined the different purported grounds on which Musk could have already violated the terms of the decree in his first few weeks of ownership. President Biden signaled support for government intervention, saying that “there’s a lot of ways” the government could review the transaction.

The FTC launched an aggressive campaign to harass Twitter, particularly after Musk took steps to reorient Twitter around free speech. Within three months, the FTC sent Twitter over a dozen letters that made more than 350 specific demands, including that Twitter provide, among other things: (1) information relating to journalists’ work protected by the First Amendment, including their work to expose censorship abuses by Big Tech and the federal government; (2) every internal communication “relating to Elon Musk”; (3) information about whether Twitter is “selling its office equipment”; (4) all reasons Twitter terminated Jim Baker, a former FBI lawyer; (5) information disaggregated by “each department, division, and/or team,” regardless of whether the work had anything to do with privacy or information security.

Khan refused to meet with Musk to discuss the situation until Twitter fully complied with all demands, many of which had nothing to do with the consent decree. Ultimately, after its extensive and expensive harassment, the FTC found no violations of the consent decree.

Democrats’ Target Political Opponents

The Justice Subcommittee also issued two reports (here and here) that summarize already known information about the Democrats’ unprecedented campaign of lawfare to keep Trump off of the campaign trail, drain him of resources, and attempt to prevent millions of Americans from being able to cast a ballot for their candidate of choice. My articles on this lawfare (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) also discuss its impact on Trump’s lawyers and supporters, whereas the Subcommittee’s reports focus on Trump.

Most conservatives believe in restraint. We try to win with integrity, logic, and tradition. That leaves us unprepared for asymmetrical attacks from the Left.

“Freedom is fragile thing,” Ronald Reagan warned in 1967, “it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

The nation’s largest cities, run by Democrats, are crime-infested, debt-ridden places making their liberal leaders a very good living.

They call it The Big Easy. While New Orleans has earned a reputation for its laid-back lifestyle, its government has long been known as an easy, sleazy den of corruption and incompetence.

It’s a good-paying gig if you can get it.

In fact, there’s much cheese to be made as a “dedicated” public servant in the nation’s largest Democrat-led cities — even while they burn.

Take New Orleans’ top crimefighter, Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick, the old gal with the Kristen Wiig Target Lady hairdo. She’s raking in more than $300,000 a year. Kirkpatrick started her tenure as superintendent in September 2023 at an annual salary of $337,943, according to a new report from government spending tracker Open The Books.

That’s a hefty paycheck, even for a 65-year-old seasoned law enforcement veteran who appears to be a dedicated soldier for the left’s three pillars of public safety: diversity, equity, and inclusion.

‘I Didn’t Know About Them’

Understandably some of her fellow citizens are questioning the value Kirkpatrick brings to her post after a U.S. born-radicalized jihadist with an ISIS flag drove a pickup truck through a crowd of Bourbon Street revelers on New Year’s Day, killing 14 and injuring dozens more. Questions of confidence definitely popped up when Kirkpatrick admitted that she had no idea that New Orleans had in 2017 put barriers in place in an attempt to impede such attacks in the tourist-rich district. The barriers were not up at the time but have since been installed.

“Actually, we have them. I didn’t know about them, but we have them, and so we have been able now to put them out,” the apparently overmatched Kirkpatrick told reporters a day after one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. 

As NBC News reported, “the 700-pound steel barriers, which are certified by the Department of Homeland Security, were credited with preventing casualties in a similar incident last year in California at the Rose Parade.” The security barriers were reportedly taken down because they had been malfunctioning, with city crews in the middle of installing a new bollard system. Apparently the bewildered police superintendent wasn’t aware of all of that.

City officials did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment.

‘When You Mess Up, You Fess Up.’

Bizarrely, Kirkpatrick was under investigation after a similar car-versus-pedestrian incident near the same area where the New Year’s terrorist attack took place. The police superintendent was driving in the French Quarter when her vehicle struck a man and a woman. The female received minor injuries.

Kirkpatrick told NOLA that she was on duty at the time, having just visited an injured police officer in the hospital when she made a left-hand turn and didn’t notice the pedestrians.

“I’m so sorry for what happened last night. I’m so grateful that the two people involved really are going to be fine. Just terribly sorry,” the superintendent said in August. The status of the investigation is not clear. In a subsequent interview, Kirkpatrick said, “When you mess up you fess up. And that is also part of leadership and leading the way. And even myself, if you mess up, I own this, I apologize for it, and then I will take the consequences for it and then we’re gonna move on.”

According to Open The Books, Kirkpatrick has collected nearly $3 million since 2016. She previously served as police chief in Oakland, California, where her 2017 starting salary grew from $250,003 to $334,090 by 2019, OTB reports. 

“The Oakland Police Commission voted unanimously to fire Kirkpatrick without cause in February 2020. She sued for wrongful termination, claiming she was fired for speaking out against alleged corruption in the Commission, an independent civilian group that oversees Oakland’s police,” the watchdog notes in its report.

She won in federal court. A judge in 2022 ordered the city of Oakland to pay Kirkpatrick $1.5 million in damages, including a full year’s salary of $337,675, according to OTB. She had sought $3 million, part of it in “emotional damages.”

Kirkpatrick, “one of the most tenured police executives in the country,” is steeped in the politics of DEI. As a National Press Foundation bio notes, the police superintendent is a national instructor at the FBI’s Law Enforcement Executive Association’s Leadership Training Program, “where she instructs on topics including, but not limited to, Bias and Diversity, Emotional Intelligence and Leading Generations.”

‘With Distinction and Integrity’

Kirkpatrick is pulling down a much heftier salary than New Orleans’ leftist Mayor LaToya Cantrell, according to Open The Books’ review. But the mayor will muddle through somehow on her $188,370 annual compensation.

Of course, Cantrell is a real high flier. She got busted a few years back bumping up her unnecessary “official” overseas flights to first class. According to New Orleans’ Fox 8, the Democrat and three of her top aides enjoyed a junket to France so the mayor could sign a “sister-city agreement.” Not willing to fly with the peasants in coach, Cantrell bumped up her seating arrangements to the elite section — charging New Orleans taxpayers $18,000 for the privilege.

“About a week after she returned from France, Cantrell traveled to Switzerland for another signing of a ‘sister city’ agreement. Her flight there cost just over $9,800, and she spent more than $11,000 for the six days in Ascona, Switzerland,” Fox 8 reported.

Cantrell had long refused to pay the city back for the extravagance, despite a city policy clearly stipulating that if city employees want to travel in business or first-class, they do so on their own dime.

“All expenses incurred doing business on behalf of the City of New Orleans will not be reimbursed to the City of New Orleans. I do my job and I will continue to do it with distinction and integrity every step of the way,” Cantrell huffed.

She ultimately agreed to pay back the nearly $29,000, but only after the New Orleans City Council threatened to take the unauthorized travel expenses out of her salary.

‘Accusation After Accusation’

Cantrell and Gilbert Montano, the city’s chief administrative officer, were implicated last year in a 25-count indictment unsealed in September. Neither has been charged, but they are referenced in the indictment against Randy Farrell of Metairie, “a licensing inspector accused of conspiring to offer bribes to city officials to dissuade an investigation of illicit permitting activity,” Fox 8 reported.

It gets worse. According to a column in the Louisiana Illuminator:

A previous federal indictment was issued July 19, accusing Jeffrey Vappie, a former member of the mayor’s police security detail, of defrauding the taxpayers by submitting false timecards to the NOPD for work he never did. The indictment charges that, instead of conducting police work during those hours, he was “carrying on a personal and romantic relationship with public official 1.”

“Public official 1” is the mayor, according to multiple reports. The FBI has charged Vappie with making false statements to try to cover up his romantic relationship with the mayor. Vappie has filed a not guilty plea, and his trial date has been pushed back to July.

“How I came in seems to be how I’m going out,” Cantrell said at the beginning of her Oct. 1 budget presentation to the City Council, according to a recording from Fox 8. “Accusation after accusation after accusation. But also a track record of delivering results.”

Crime Pays

While Cantrell did Europe in style and Kirkpatrick made law enforcement diversity, equity and inclusion a top priority, New Orleans continued to hold the dubious honor as one of the most dangerous cities in America. While the former “Murder Capital” boasts of a significant decline in violent crimes from the record numbers a few years ago amid the national “defund the police” movement, celebrating FBI crime statistics can be a tricky business. As John R. Lott, Jr. reported in October in The Federalist, the bureau has been caught fudging the numbers in the Biden years.

“While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8 percent since Biden took office, the NCVS [National Crime Victimization Survey] numbers show total violent crime has risen by 55.4 percent,” the story, originally published by RealClearInvestigations, notes.

That’s the same FBI, by the way, that missed an Islamic State-inspired terrorist’s deadly intentions because it was too busy hosting DEI-ladened recruitment sessions.

“#FBINewOrleans is holding a Diversity Agent Recruiting event and we want to meet you! Agents and FBI executives will provide first hand information about a rewarding career. Apply now to see if you qualify for the July 17th event in Metairie, LA here: https://ow.ly/YWh250RPl15,” an inclusive X post advertised in June.

The story is the same all over. The nation’s largest cities, run by Democrats, are crime-infested, debt-ridden places that are making their leftist leaders a very good living.

According to a salary review by Open The Books for The Federalist, the mayors of the nation’s five-largest cities hauled in a combined $1 million-plus in total compensation in 2023 — not counting kickbacks.

While California Burns

Karen Bass, the grossly incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, raked in compensation totaling more than $300,000, according to OTB’s records. As the Los Angeles-area burns from “unprecedented” wildfires, Bass is on the hot seat for slashing the city’s fire-fighting budget. As the wildfires raged out of control, the Democrat mayor was in West Africa— attending the inauguration of Ghana’s president. Bass was one of four delegates representing President Joe Biden. 

Her predecessor, like Bass, pumped plenty of DEI into “fire protection,” according to my Federalist colleague Beth Brelje.

In January 2022, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti checked multiple DEI boxes by appointing Kristin Crowley as fire chief, the first female, LGBT chief in Los Angeles. That year, according to LAFD data, “of the more than 6,500 applicants to LAFD, 70% were people of color and nearly 8% … were female,” which was “double the … percentage of female firefighters within the Department” at the time.

Crowley, according to OTB’s review, collected “an absurd $439,772 — $412,493 base pay and $27,278 ‘other’ pay.”

Crowley has pushed the banner of DEI inside the Los Angeles Fire Department.

“As the fire chief, if confirmed, I vow to take a strategic and balanced approach to ensure we meet the needs of the community we serve,” she said, as Newsweek quoted her. “We will focus our efforts on increasing our operational effectiveness, enhancing firefighter safety and well-being, and fully commit to fostering a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture within the LAFD.”

Los Angeles’ top cop, Jim McDonnell, was sworn in in November at a $450,000 base salary, one of the highest police chief salaries among the nation’s largest cities, according to the Associated Press.

And if you’re scoring along at home, Brian K. Williams, Bass’ deputy mayor for public safety, was on administrative leave after being accused of making a bomb threat to city hall, the Associated Press reports. The FBI searched Williams’ home last month, and the matter remains under investigation. 

Crime and Debt

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, facing corruption charges, collected $258,041.16 in total compensation in 2023, according to OTB. The mayor is looking at some big legal bills ahead of an April trial tied to his alleged relationship with Turkish government officials. Prosecutors accuse Adams of accepting tens of thousands of dollars in improper gifts, including extravagant international travel packages from wealthy foreign businesspeople. Earlier this week, federal prosecutors said “law enforcement has continued to identify additional individuals involved in Adams’ conduct, and to uncover additional criminal conduct by Adams.”

The Democrat, who has pleaded not guilty, blasted the prosecutors at a press conference.

“You know, even Ray Charles can see what’s going on. And I have an attorney, Alex Spiro, he is handling that. I’ve said over and over again, I’ve done nothing wrong. Let the attorneys do that. I have to run the city,” Adams told reporters Tuesday.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — Let’s Go Brandon! — was set to earn about $221,052 last year following a pay raise tied to inflation, according to Illinois Policy. Chicago City Council members, the publication reported, pulled down a comfortable salary of just shy of $146,000 after a whopping 9.6% pay raise in 2023, even as crime and debt continued to devour the Democrat-led Windy City.

“Chicago is not only the nation’s murder capital but leads the nation in mass shootings. Last year, there were 83 mass shootings, which Chicago Police define as three or more,” Illinois Policy reported in July.

Left Coast Corruption

Ousted San Francisco Mayor London Breed was the highest-paid mayor in the nation, raking in $383,760 in total salary and benefits in 2023, according to Open The Books.

Breed’s tenure in office was so disastrous that even the most devout liberals in the leftist city couldn’t take any more. The Democrat lost her bid for reelection in November amid chaos in San Francisco’s streets. Her leftist leadership only exacerbated the city’s homeless, drug, and brazen retail theft crises. Breed’s fellow Bay Area Marxist, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, suffered a worse fate — she was ousted in a recall election after just two years into a four-year term under a cloud of corruption.

Breed, too, faced a corruption scandal heading into November’s election after the former director of the mayor’s multi-million dollar “Dream Keeper” initiative, billed as an “ambitious social equity program,” was suspected of improperly spending funds. Breed faced “mounting scrutiny” after the San Francisco Chronicle investigation exposed troubling expenditures.

Despite the crime, the incompetence, and the corruption, voters in the America’s biggest cities continue to elect leftist mayors. NBC News called the Dem stranglehold on mayoral seats — effectively 10 of 10 liberals leading the 10 most-populated communities in 2023 — the new “Blue Wall.” That same year, Democrats controlled all but three mayor’s offices in the nation’s 25 most-populous cities, according to the corporate news outlet.

“Those 25 cities are home to 38 million residents, about 12% of the country’s total population and more people than the combined populations of 21 states,” the NBC News noted.

‘Mentality of Liberal Failure’

While Democrats still dominate the city electoral map, President-elect Donald Trump “made significant inroads in surprising places,” from blue havens like New Jersey, New York, and Hawaii, according to an AP analysis of November’s vote totals. AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, “found that Trump made substantial gains among Black and Latino men, younger voters, and nonwhite voters without a college degree, compared with his 2020 performance.”

In the Bronx, for instance, Trump picked up 27 percent of the vote, unheard of in the deep blue bastion, according to the New York State Board of Elections. It was the best showing by a Republican presidential candidate there in 40 years, NBC News reported.

“Even Chicago, the bluest of blue cities, is getting Trumpier,” Chicago Magazine reported post-election.

“In the last three elections, Donald Trump has steadily increased his share of the vote here, from 12.4 percent in 2016, to 15.8 percent in 2020, to 21.4 percent” in November’s election, the publication noted. “In Illinois as a whole, Trump’s percentage jumped from 40.5 percent in 2020 to 44.3 percent this year.”

Of course, lots of Democrats, uninspired by fill-in candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, sat out the election. But Patricia Easley (aka “P Rae”), a black conservative activist and mega MAGA backer from Chicago, last summer predicted growing support for Trump in her city, as black voters especially grow tired of generations of broken promises from Democrats.

“Our goal is to get people away from the mentality of liberal failure that is happening in our city,” Easley, the founder of conservative group ChicagoRed, told me at July’s Republican National Convention.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image credit: YouTube screenshot KPRC2

Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

How Barak Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought Machine And How It Was Destroyed

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.

In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1922 book, as “public opinion.”

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.

Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump’s defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.