Consumer spending fell sharply in January, presenting a potential early danger sign for the economy, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
Advance retail sales declined 0.8% for the month following a downwardly revised 0.4% gain in December, according to the Census Bureau. A decrease had been expected: Economists surveyed by Dow Jones were looking for a drop of 0.3%, in part to make up for seasonal distortions that probably boosted December’s number.
However, the pullback was considerably more than anticipated. Even excluding autos, sales dropped 0.6%, well below the estimate for a 0.2% gain.
The sales report is adjusted for seasonal factors but not for inflation, so the release showed spending lagging the pace of price increases. On a year-over-year basis, sales were up just 0.6%.
Headline inflation rose 0.3% in January and 0.4% when excluding food and energy prices, the Labor Department reported Tuesday. On a year-over-year basis, the two readings were 3.1% and 3.9%, respectively.
Co-authored by Natasha Bertrand, the gargantuan exposé claimed a mysterious “binder” of “highly classified information related to Russian election interference” went “missing” in the chaotic waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2021, raising concerns that some of America’s most “closely guarded national security secrets… could be exposed.”
CNN and its intelligence sources meant “exposure” in a bad way. Sources have told Public and Racket, however, that the secrets officials worry might be “exposed” are ones that would implicate them in widespread abuses of intelligence authority dating back to the 2015-2016 election season.
“I would call [the binder] Trump’s insurance policy,” said someone knowledgeable about the case. “He was very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was the road map” of Russiagate.
Transgressions range from Justice Department surveillance of domestic political targets without probable cause to the improper unmasking of a pre-election conversation between a Trump official and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to WMD-style manipulation of intelligence for public reports on alleged Russian “influence activities.”
The CNN report claimed intelligence officials were concerned about the disclosure of “sources and methods that informed the U.S. government’s assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.”
They should be concerned. The story of how a team “hand-picked” by CIA Director John Brennan relied on “cooked intelligence” to craft that January 6th, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment is the subject of tomorrow’s story, the last in this three-part series.
Corruption, not tradecraft, is what officials are desperate to keep secret.
The ”missing binder” story has several variants. Sources offer differing answers on the question of whether anything of consequence is missing. They give mixed accounts of Trump’s frantic last efforts to declassify Russia-related material.
But nearly everyone Public and Racket spoke to agreed that the tale obscured a broader and more important story.
Dating back to the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” in 2018 exposing the corruption of the FISA application process, senior intelligence officials, including Trump’s CIA Director, Gina Haspel, have repeatedly blocked attempts to declassify information about the Trump-Russia investigation.
They had good reason to obstruct the release of these documents.
Special Counsel Robert Hur is preparing to be grilled by House lawmakers over his recent damning report that highlighted serious concerns with Democrat President Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness.
As Slay News reported, Hur last week released his report on his investigations into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
While the conclusion of the report was already controversial, it was Hur’s rationale for not pursuing charges against Biden that caused the biggest stir.
Hur noted in his report that Biden struggled with basic questions during interviews, specifically regarding key elements of his own life.
According to the report, Biden couldn’t remember what year he left the vice presidential office or even when his son Beau died.
The special counsel concluded that a jury wouldn’t convict Biden once they realize he’s an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report compounds voters’ long-held concerns about the president’s age and obvious mental decline.
Hur’s testimony, expected to land in early March, would likely be before the House Judiciary Committee, Axios reported Thursday.
On Thursday, special counsel David Weiss charged a former FBI informant who claimed President Biden was bribed by Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. The indictment claims the informant lied about Biden’s alleged role in the business dealings.
Alexander Smirnov, 43, was arrested on Thursday at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, per CNN.
Smirnov has been accused in the indictment that his story to the FBI “was a fabrication, an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to [Joe Biden] when he was in office.”
The informant, who has now been identified as Smirnov, provided testimony to House Republicans and their investigation into the Biden family’s alleged illegal foreign business dealings. He claimed that Burisma executives paid President Biden and his son Hunter Biden $5 million each to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who had been investigating Burisma at the time.
The informant claimed that the bribery occurred while Biden was vice president serving under Barack Obama.
The indictment states, “In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when [Joe Biden] had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office.”
“In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Joe Biden] and his candidacy,” it continues.
Following the deadly Iran-backed attack on American troops in Jordan on January 28, President Biden and his Pentagon brass pledged a “multi-tier” response for the brazen assault that killed three U.S. service members.
The retributive strikes saw at least one senior leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah — one of the handful of Iran-backed terrorist organizations that have been coordinating scores of attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East since October — in Baghdad, but there was a notable lack of punishment for the source of all the chaos in the region: the regime in Tehran. It appears that was by Biden’s design.
Instead of acting swiftly and decisively, however, the administration telegraphed its considerations and likely targets for days on end. Waiting until after the fallen heroes had returned to the United States for a dignified transfer in Dover, Delaware, the Biden administration finally began launching strikes in the region.
According toreporting from the Financial Times, “Iran pulled senior commanders of its Revolutionary Guard out of Syria days before the US launched strikes against Iranian-linked targets in the Arab state to prevent the elite force suffering further casualties.” Conveniently, the IRGC “officers had left Syria by the time Washington launched air strikes five days” after Biden promised to launch a response to the attack that killed U.S. troops.
Reminding that the Biden administration said it “directly targeted Revolutionary Guard facilities in Syria,” that means the agents of Tehran operating in support of Iran’s terror proxies were able to get away, thanks to Biden’s delays and ample warnings.
As Joe Truzman, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), noted, Iran saving its officers’ hide was “exactly what the Biden administration intended” to happen.
Exactly what the Biden administration intended when it telegraphed it was going to strike following the drone attack that killed three American troops in Jordan. https://t.co/hvmiTwnKVC
Even worse — and proving that Biden’s strikes in response to the killing of U.S. Army Sgts. Kennedy Sanders, William Rivers, and Breonna Moffett won’t prevent future attacks on American troops — is this nugget, also reported by the Financial Times.
Iranian officials, calling the decision to withdraw IRGC commanders merely a “change in tactics,” received notice from the U.S. “through indirect channels that it did not seek a conflict with Iran.”
That is, after Iranian patronage to terrorist organizations saw more than 170 attacks launched at U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan and took the lives of three American service members, the U.S. told Tehran we didn’t seek a conflict.
That also means, as an “Iranian analyst affiliated to the Islamic regime” told the Financial Times, “[o]nce there is relative calm, these forces will return to Syria.” And Tehran’s support of terrorist proxies in the region will resume at full strength.
FLASHBACK: Joe Biden previously said “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings”
Today it’s reported that Biden met with the chairman of the Chinese energy firm Hunter sought to create a joint venture with at the Four Seasons.pic.twitter.com/mTsD5XItMI
In the latest video that the White House doesn’t want you to see, Presidentish Joe Biden is seen Monday walking it off after banging his head on the doorway of his Marine One personal transport helicopter.
It isn’t a big deal, I swear, and it’s been my job for more than 20 years now to gleefully mock the foibles and pitfalls of the rich and powerful. That goes double for figures like Biden, who grew rich without ever having created any goods or provided any valuable services in the private sector and who grew powerful despite a political career defined by lies, gaffes, and cheap demagoguery than any accomplishments.
So let’s watch the clip anyway before we get to the good stuff.
That’s not even gonna leave a mark. “Why then,” I can hear you ask through the magic of internet-enhanced telepathy, “are we watching a video of the president lightly bonking his skull on the door of Marine One?”
The first reason is because it fits the narrative of Biden being old and increasingly clumsy. It seems like Biden hadn’t even been in office for two months [Steve, Biden hadn’t been in office for even two months —editor] when he tripped up the stairs of Air Force One not once but three times in one, ah, trip.
A bon voyage, that was not.
Since then, Biden has fallen repeatedly, he wanders around looking lost after delivering remarks (usually poorly), and he tries to shake hands with people who aren’t there.
The second reason is so schadenfreudelicious that it’s smothered in a red wine cream sauce lightly seasoned with two dashes of evil laughter.
Unlike the alleged President of the United States being unable to peg the death of his eldest son to within a range of years, you and I probably remember last week pretty clearly — or at least the highlights.
One of those highlights — if that’s the correct word — was the release of the just-alluded-to report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Special Counsel Robert K. Hur found, in part, that it was pointless to try and prosecute Biden because a jury would be too sympathetic to convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The report was so damning that the White House decided that changing Hur’s narrative was worth the risk of putting Biden out in front of reporters, where he proceeded to present himself as an angry, elderly man with a poor memory.
Narrative un-reset, the White House decided to go to Twitter and lean hard on Dark Biden memes. They even got Biden to sign up for a TikTok account — despite the well-known security risks — because TikTok is where all the young hepcats hang out these days.
Some improvement, eh?
Every time the White House tries to change the narrative that Biden is an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper, he goes out and does something that makes him look like an increasingly senescent elderly man with a growing temper. Because that’s what he is.
Age gets to all of us if we’re lucky enough to live that long. But only 45 men have ever served as President, none have been as old as Joe Biden, and the only one who was more frail was Woodrow Wilson — after Wilson suffered a completely debilitating stroke.
I spend my workdays wondering if that’s more sad than frightening or the other way around.
The “Cabal” who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made.
The bloom is off the Biden presidency.
In 2020, we were told that he would bring about a return to normalcy. Bring America respect abroad. Calm down our “chaotic” domestic political scene. And make government respectable again.
How’s he doing? Well, let’s review some headlines from this weekend’s New York Times, normally a reliable booster of Democratic presidents, good, bad, or indifferent.
“The Challenges of an Aging President.”
“Mr. President, Ditch the Stealth About Health.”
“The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside. It’s How.”
This isn’t news to Americans, of course. As an ABC News poll, also out this weekend, illustrated, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that Biden is too old for another term.
The bloom is off the Biden presidency.
(This is an official White House photo. It’s supposed to make Biden look good. It’s the best they can do now.)
Last week’s Special Counsel report over Biden’s mishandling of classified documents basically found the same thing. While the Special Counsel recommended that Biden not be prosecuted for what seemed like clear violations of the law governing secret papers, the reason for his recommendation was that Biden is too old and out of it to be put on trial.
Biden didn’t help himself when he turned down the traditional Super Bowl interview, presumably – as James Carville helpfully pointed out – because that would have called attention to his inability to string two sentences together coherently. Carville called it a “sign” that Biden’s own administration doesn’t have confidence in him.
And Hillary Clinton even twisted the knife, calling Biden’s age a “legitimate issue.”
Joe Biden is incapable of assuring voters he can handle another presidential term, his team has ‘no plan’ on how to deal with his senile behavior, and he should simply ‘not be running for re-election,’ according to New York Times authors.
Anxieties from the liberal Times’ Editorial Board and opinion writers show how worried they are that ailing Biden may not be able to beat ‘bad man’ Donald Trump this year.
The back-to-back opinion pieces knifing the elderly president, 81, over the weekend comes after a Justice Department report ripped into his handling of classified documents and portrayed him as a forgetful old man.
The 388-page report by Special Counsel Robert Hur confirmed he would not be charged – but it said that was because a jury would probably conclude he had ‘diminished faculties’ and was a ‘well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.’
Biden’s lack of enthusiasm on the campaign trail, coupled with his doddering public appearances and ‘crotchety grandpa’ attitude, are huge concerns during this ‘dark time’ in his presidential tenure, according to the left-leaning broadsheet paper.
‘He needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,’ the Times board stated on Sunday.
The back-to-back opinion pieces knifing the elderly president, 81, comes after a Justice Department report into his handling of classified documents was released
OMAHA, Neb. — Nebraska’s largest city won’t be able to enforce its ban on guns on all public property, including parks and sidewalks, while a lawsuit challenging that restriction moves forward.
Douglas County District Judge LeAnne Srb issued a preliminary injunction Friday blocking that ban, but she refused to put Omaha’s restrictions on “ghost guns” and bump stocks on hold.
The Liberty Justice Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Nebraska Firearms Owners Association arguing that the city restrictions violate a new state law passed last year that allows people to carry concealed guns across the state without a permit and without the need to complete a gun safety course. A similar lawsuit challenging gun restrictions in Lincoln remains pending.
“We are thrilled with the court’s decision to grant this injunction and uphold Nebraskans’ rights against executive overreach,” said Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center. “Under Nebraska law, local governments do not have the authority to regulate firearms — the right to bear arms is protected across the state.”
Just before gun owners filed these lawsuits, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers published an opinion stating that state law preempts executive orders from the mayors restricting guns.
Omaha City Attorney Matt Kuhse said “while it is unfortunate that the court enjoined the city’s ability to protect our public spaces, we will abide by this order.” But the city will continue to fight the lawsuit.
“The President’s job—and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid enough is picked he won’t realize this—is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.”—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
My phone buzzed early in the evening. A message from one of my paid subscribers telling me about an impending press conference by one of my least favorite subspecies of humanity: a politician. She requested that I watch the conference and give my take on the potential historical significance of the event and/or share some history that might inform her understanding of the event.
This is not my idea of a “good time.” I would literally rather explain the evolution of torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition—that, at least, would have a flavor of the lurid to leaven the horror on display.
Nevertheless, I allowed myself to be convinced. I need to keep my paid supporters happy (and yes, if you’re a paid supporter, I will pay attention to your requests for topics—I may not always fulfill them the next day, but they will go into the hopper. I’m an honest intellectual whore: I know how to sing for my supper). Besides, the event in question turned out to be a lot more important than I was hoping it would be. So here we go.
The Immediate Context
To get us all on the same page, here’s the skinny:
During his years as Vice President, Joe Biden appropriated a bunch of classified documents, some of which wound up in file boxes in his garage. On the face of it, this seems an even more egregious a violation of the official documents handling laws than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server (a matter on which the DOJ declined prosecution) and former President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of maybe-declassified-then-reclassified-but-maybe-not documents in his part-time residence at Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida (for which he is currently being prosecuted).
Tucked among the pages were an implied justification for declining to prosecute (the administration cooperated with the investigation, and without obstruction charges in the mix the rest becomes harder to prosecute) and a startling explicit justification: President Biden, the most powerful man on the planet, is incompetent to stand trial.
Relevant excerpt from the prosecutor’s report
Another relevant excerpt
Biden held a press conference in response:
It did not go well.
You can watch it for yourself here:
Even as Biden declared himself competent and his memory sound, he forgot the name of the church from which his son’s memorial rosary was procured, he mixed up the President of Egypt with the President of Mexico, he inadvertently (if subtly) changed American foreign policy with regards to the current war between Israel and Hamas, he seemed unsure for a fleeting moment whether his dead son was, in fact, dead [3m11s], and he claimed responsibility for the crimes of which the special prosecutor had just declined prosecution (even while denying they took place and dissembling about their nature).
In my lifetime so far, I have seen seven Presidents. If I were to evaluate them by competence (Note: This is NOT a comment on the policies or politics of any of these men), I’d characterize them thusly:
Two of them were pretty-okay (Reagan and Bush 1), one was not politically astute (Carter), and then there was the parade of the most incompetent, self-involved, and corrupt dip shits ever to occupy the Oval Office, each one worse than the last (Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump—the first two of these were, at least, capable of holding productive conversations with other people in government, despite their inability to be consistently interested in the actual prosecution of their own avowed policy agendas).
Even if he hadn’t done so before, Biden revealed in this press conference that he is, hands down, the least-fit occupant of the Oval Office in the history of the Republic (which, in light of his four immediate predecessors, is a hell of an accomplishment).
What Happens Now?
In a “normal” world—which is to say, the artificial world my generation was taught about in our high school history classes, which is far from normal—Joe Biden would be removed from office tomorrow, on 25th Amendment grounds, by his own party. The party itself would not lose power, as they still control congress and would still control the White House, and they would head into the November Election from a position of moral strength: “We care so much about the country that we will remove this good man who isn’t up to the job anymore.”
Failing that, he would be impeached by his own party.
And, failing that, he would be locked out of a brokered Democratic Convention and not allowed to run for a second term.
"Of course we're going to keep stealing your money through inflation — you're too feckless & cowardly to fight back … And otherwise we'd have to cut govt spending" https://t.co/fwPKVYdIiY
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’” The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example). However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance. First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops. Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response. The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
There’s more coming on this, and other articles forthcoming (readers who’ve noticed it’s been quiet around here will soon find out why). While the world falls to pieces over Tucker, Putin, and Ukraine, don’t overlook this horror movie. If banks and the Treasury are playing the same domestic spy game that Twitter and Facebook have been playing with the FBI, tales like the frozen finances of protesting Canadian truckers won’t be novelties for long. As is the case with speech, where huge populations have learned to internalize censorship rules almost overnight, we may soon have to learn the hard way that even though some behaviors aren’t illegal, they can still be punished with great effectiveness, in a Terminator-like world where computers won’t miss anything that moves.
What a crazy time we live in! See you from the Nevada caucus, and watch this space for other news soon.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said President Joe Biden is not running the White House, but someone else is governing the country as she raised concerns over the border crisis that is “an extreme remaking of America.”
During an interview on Fox News on Feb. 4, when asked by host Maria Bartiromo why President Biden is providing free housing and health care to illegal immigrants, Ms. Noem said, “He’s weak. Somebody’s running the White House. I don’t believe it’s Joe Biden. He’s never been this extreme. This is an extreme remaking of America.”
“It is a socialist-communist agenda. I think that they’ve so infiltrated the Democrat party that it’s no longer the Democrat Party of 20 years ago; it’s now a socialist party that does not want a strong America,” she added.
Ms. Noem is one of over a dozen GOP governors who have visited Texas to show their support for Gov. Greg Abbott in his fight with the Biden administration over the influx of illegal immigrants crossing the border in Eagle Pass.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) estimated throughout the 2023 fiscal year, 2.4 million people illegally crossed the border, up from 2.3 million the previous year. In contrast, between Oct. 1, 2019, to Sept. 30, 2020, before President Biden took office, there were only 458,000 encounters with illegal immigrants by border patrol agents.
In the interview, South Dakota’s governor criticized the Biden administration for the border crisis. “We see the president undermining our country by allowing this invasion at the southern border, and it’s destabilizing our country,” she said.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Monday revealed yet another facet of the Biden Administration’s sprawling censorship system that targeted dissenting books. It appears that, as with social media companies, it succeeded in getting the company not to promote disfavored books.
Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan revealed on X that the White House was directly involved in the censorship campaign. That includes a 2021 email from one Biden official asking to discuss “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”
Amazon in turn appears to ask only how high the Biden White House wants it to jump on censorship: “[i]s the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?”
After the meeting, Amazon confirmed in an email that it was actively doing what the government demanded in suppressing sales by not promoting disfavored books: “As a reminder, we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options for these books with you.”
This effort notably parallels demands from Democratic leaders who have called for enlightened algorithms to frame what citizens access on the internet. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) objected that people were not listening to the informed views of herself and leading experts. Instead, they were reading views of skeptics by searching Amazon and finding books by “prominent spreaders of misinformation.”
BLUF
In other words, look at how consistently inconsistent AI already is in its biases, without the intervention of powerful government actors. Imagine just how much more biased it can get — and how difficult it would be for us to recognize it — if we hand the keys over to the government.
We showed up to warn about threats to free speech from AI. Half the room couldn’t care less.
Earlier today, I served as a witness at the House Judiciary Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which discussed (among other things) whether it’s a good idea for the government to regulate artificial intelligence and LLMs. For my part, I was determined to warn everyone not only about the threat AI poses to free speech, but also the threats regulatory capture and a government oligopoly on AI pose to the creation of knowledge itself.
I was joined on the panel by investigative journalist Lee Fang, reporter Katelynn Richardson, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen. Richardson testified about her reporting on government funding the development of tools to combat “misinformation” through a National Science Foundation grant program. As FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr noted, such technology could be misused in anti-speech ways.
“The government doesn’t violate the First Amendment simply by funding research, but it’s troubling when tax dollars are used to develop censorship technology,” said Terr. “If the government ultimately used this technology to regulate allegedly false online speech, or coerced digital platforms to use it for that purpose, that would violate the First Amendment. Given government officials’ persistent pressure on social media platforms to regulate misinformation, that’s not a far-fetched scenario.”
Lee Fang testified about his reporting on government involvement in social media moderation decisions, most recently how a New York Times reporter’s tweet was suppressed by Twitter (now X) following notification from a Homeland Security agency. Fang’s investigative journalism on the documents X released after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform has highlighted the risk of “jawboning,” or the use of government platforms to effectuate censorship through informal pressure.
Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed that it seemed like we were having (at least) two different hearings at once. Although there were several tangents, the discussion on the Republican side was mostly about the topic at hand. On the Democratic side, unfortunately, it was overwhelmingly about how Trump has promised to use the government to target his enemies if he wins a second term. It’s not a trivial concern, but the hearing was an opportunity to discuss the serious threats posed by the use of AI censorship tools in the hands of a president of either party, so I wish there had been more interest in the question at hand on the Democratic side of the committee.
The White House wants to enlist school officials to help hoodwink parents about its gun control plans, according to a statement issued last week.
The reason is simple: They want to take advantage of the officials’ credibility, which the White House lacks, especially when it comes to guns.
Teachers and administrators, the White House said in the statement, “can be trusted, credible messengers when it comes to providing guidance on gun violence prevention and safe firearm storage options.”
The new program, which is one of three executive orders Joe Biden issued last week, will be spearheaded by Jill Biden, White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention Director Stefanie Feldman and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
“This issue matters to the President. It weighs on his heart every day. And he’s not going to stop fighting until we’ve solved it,” Jill Biden said last week while touting the plan at a “Gun Violence Prevention Event,” which was held in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
From a civil rights perspective, the most worrisome portion of the White House plan is a customizable “communications template,” which school officials “can use to engage with parents and families about the importance of safe firearm storage and encourage more people to take preventive action by safely storing firearms.”
The template is designed so school officials can insert the name of the school and their letterhead to make it appear as though the document came from the school and not the White House. In fact, neither the White House nor the Biden-Harris administration are even mentioned in the document.
Dear [INSERT NAME OF SCHOOL OR SCHOOL DISTRICT] Families, Guardians, and Caregivers:
and
Sincerely, [INSERT NAME OF SCHOOL OR SCHOOL DISTRICT ADMINISTRATOR]
The template was accompanied by a letter from DOE Secretary Cardona, which urges school officials to comply with the new White House mandate.
“We encourage all school leaders to consider taking steps to build awareness in your school community about safe firearm storage, such as:
Share information about safe firearm storage with parents and families in your school communities. You can use the enclosed letter as a resource for parents, families, guardians, and caregivers—as well as teachers and school staff—to help build awareness around safe firearm storage, including what people can do to safely store firearms in their homes and spaces that children may occupy. You can also customize the letter to better meet your community’s needs.
Partner with other municipal and community leaders to help improve understanding of safe firearm storage and broader gun violence prevention efforts.
Engage other organizations and partners within your community, such as parent organizations, out-of-school time program leaders, nonprofit agencies, and other community-based youth-serving entities who routinely interact with children, teens, families, guardians, and caregivers, to inform them about the importance of safe firearm storage.
Integrate information about safe firearm storage into your communications with families, guardians, and caregivers about overall emergency preparedness and school safety.”
Propaganda
There is a lot going on here, and none of it is good.
The White House’s template is classic propaganda, in which a target audience is unaware they are being influenced and unaware of the true source of the message.
It is a psychological operation, or psyop, which targets unsuspecting Americans. Before the Bidens moved into the White House, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Nowadays, it’s become commonplace.
That the White House and its gun control office would publicly propose such a plan proves they do not fear exposure from the legacy media. This, too, is telling. They know who their friends are and don’t worry about repercussions.
School officials will have little choice but to participate in this scam. Secretary Cardona’s letter will see to that.
Joe Biden, or more likely his handlers and puppeteers, have rewritten the rules to further their war on our guns. Now, anything goes, including psyops and other forms of gaslighting and deception.
The White House statement also mentions that faith leaders and law enforcement have credibility in their communities.
There’s little doubt the Biden-Harris administration will make a run at the nation’s clergy next.
A friend recently wrote me to offer a sharp formulation of a distinction I have often written about myself. Regular readers know that I am fond of distinguishing between “democracy”—a political arrangement in which the demos, the people, rule—and “Our Democracy™,” a counterfeit or masquerade of democracy in which not the people but an elite nomenklatura rule. To an increasing extent, I believe, the United States is gradually subsisting into the latter, with all the political, social, and moral deformations that such anxious oligarchical arrangements entail.
True enough, the United States was never really a democracy—a form of government, as James Madison observed in Federalist 10, that tended to be “as short in its life as it is violent in its death.” Rather, the United States was, from the beginning, a democratic republic. Ultimately, the people were sovereign—that was the point of the phrase “We the People.” But their sovereignty was mediated through the agency of representation. The point of my distinction, however, still holds. The Founders bequeathed us a democratic republic and a Constitution whose chief purpose was to define and limit the power of government. Their modern successors have inhabited that political dispensation, slyly perverting and emptying it out of its original signification while maintaining the names and rituals of the original.
If you believe that the words “perverting” and “emptying it out of its original signification” are extreme, I invite you to contemplate the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” To what extent is the letter or spirit of that instruction followed today?
The answer is: not at all. What was originally a document designed to limit government and protect people from its coercive intervention has mutated into a reliquary containing the desiccated remains of a once-potent, now mostly quaint and antique admonition.
Which brings me back to my friend’s crisply formulated distinction. There are, he noted, two forms of law: rule of law and rule bylaw. The first, he wrote, the rule of law, “is based upon neutral rules that are in place and applicable to all without regard to political belief or status, economic class, religion, etc. That is or was the aim of classical liberal politics—to erect a limited system of laws applied to all as a foundation for liberty.” That’s precisely what the Framers intended to bequeath us.
The alternative, rule by law, describes the antithesis. Indeed, it is
a system of rules applied at the discretion of ruling elites, who exempt themselves and allies from those rules, and apply them to others on an arbitrary basis. The rule by law comes into play when the state has evolved into a large-scale enterprise and has formulated laws in scale and number that are capture citizens in a web of rules. In that circumstance, it is not difficulty to enforce rule by law, where the laws or rules can be applied politically or arbitrarily.
