Authored by Sundance via The Conservative Treehouse,

As the story is told [SEE HERE], and it aligns with every scintilla of researched data on the darkest and deepest elements of the Deep State, DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard has reversed her position and will now support FISA-702, the warrantless searches of American communication and electronic metadata.

Apparently the FISA process and the 702 aspect (specific to American citizens) is the line in the sand the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has drawn.  If Tulsi Gabbard does not support it, her confirmation is in doubt.  As a result, she has reportedly reversed her position and now supports it.

This is absolutely par for the course.

It should be remembered, in the last reauthorization of FISA-702 congress exempted themselves from the warrantless search and surveillance system used by the U.S. Intelligence Apparatus.  Congress forbids the FBI or any entity with access to the NSA database, from being allowed to use the process to search themselves or their staff.  However, every other American does not enjoy this same protection.

After spending years asking every representative of consequence why they support the FISA-702 process, I can tell you every one of them says they believe it is needed because the IC tells them there are just too many domestic terror threats that need to be monitored.

It is impossible to find a person in DC who will forcefully try to stop FISA-702 reauthorization.

If you ask me why in hindsight, I now take the position that FISA-702 is the gateway to the massive surveillance system currently being put into place using Real ID and the AI facial recognition software provided by Palantir (CIA exploit).  In essence, the gateway that allows the full-scale surveillance state, is opened by the prior authorization of FISA-702 that negates any 4th amendment protection.

Why? Because all of the surveillance mechanisms within the network being updated and enhanced by AI search and capture, comes from the IC being allowed to exploit the NSA database.  That same database access allowance is the targeting mechanism for FISA-702.  If warrantless searches of the NSA database were stopped, the Palantir/IC and Tech Bro collaboration could hit a brick wall.

Against this backdrop, the SSCI telling Tulsi Gabbard that her nomination approval is contingent upon her support for FISA-702, simply makes sense.

WASHINGTON DC – […] Multiple senators from both parties who met with the former Hawaii lawmaker in recent days told us they emerged from those sessions unsure about Gabbard’s position on the 702 program. During these meetings, senators have pressed Gabbard on her previous public statements on the issue, as well as her votes against 702 reauthorization throughout her eight years in Congress.

GOP national security hawks in particular viewed this as problematic, we’re told, fueling renewed doubts about her confirmation prospects. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested on a WSJ podcast Wednesday that Gabbard should disavow her previous opposition to the 702 program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) also sent us a statement Thursday night supporting Gabbard’s 702 stance — a key indicator of how the GOP leadership is thinking about her nomination.

“Tulsi Gabbard has assured me in our conversations that she supports Section 702 as recently amended and that she will follow the law and support its reauthorization as DNI,” Cotton said.

That last part is important because, if confirmed as DNI, Gabbard would need to certify the statute annually in order for intelligence collection to continue under the 702 program.  (read more)

This is also a big part of the reason why the DC Deep State will easily confirm Kash Patel to be Donald Trump’s FBI Director.  Kash Patel is a big believer in the value of FISA-702.

Authored by Kenin Spivak via AmericanMind.org,

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.

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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.”

As President-elect Donald Trump goes full throttle on his proposed 25% tariffs on Canadian goods until they fix their porous border – which America’s northern neighbor has already vowed to address – Conservative leader Pierre Poilievere says that Trump should remember that the US benefits from cheap Canadian oil, which they’ve been selling at a “massive price discount.”

According to Poilievre, this has allowed American refineries to have “profited” at Canada’s expense, adding that tariffs on Canadian energy would mean many Americans would lose their jobs – and that both countries are better off without them so that the US can continue to get “low-cost, totally reliable 100% ally” energy.

“I would remind our American friends that they benefit from our affordable, reliable energy, and the alternative is Venezuela, Iran, and other foreign dictatorships,” he said at a Jan. 9 press conference in Ottawa. “Why would we not want to have a North American energy market that enriches us both?”

The US is the largest consumer of Canadian oil and gas – receiving 97% of the country’s crude oil exports in 2023, with the majority (87%) coming from Alberta, the country’s largest oil producing region.

On Jan. 7, Trump doubled down on his threat to impose the 25% tariffs on Canada when he takes office, adding that he would consider using “economic force” to merge the two  countries.

According to Trump, America is “subsidizing” Canada, and the US doesn’t actually need the northern neighbor for things like lumber, dairy and automobiles.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. trade deficit with Canada amounted to US$67.9 billion (C$91.6 billion) in 2023. Meanwhile, Statistics Canada estimates Canada’s surplus with the U.S. last year was US$80.5 billion ($108.6 billion). Trade data reported by the two countries varies due to differences in assumptions.

In 2023, crude oil exports accounted for 16 percent of Canada’s total export value, estimated at $124 billion. –Epoch Times

Officials in Alberta say that the federal government’s cancellation of pipeline projects to deliver Canadian oil and gas to other markets has meant that Canada has to sell its energy at deeper discounts to the United States.

Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times,

A coalition of female athletes and women’s advocacy groups has asked President-elect Donald Trump for his help in demanding that the NCAA “restore fairness and opportunity to collegiate sports.”

In a letter to Trump dated Jan. 9, the coalition requests the soon-to-be inaugurated president to use his “powerful voice to urge the NCAA to take action and clarify participation rules to protect the rights and opportunities of female athletes.”

The coalition alleged that the NCAA has “failed” to respond to female athletes “who have been forced to choose between forfeiting games or participating in competitions that are fundamentally unfair and even dangerous.”

The group said it is appealing to the NCAA “in the name of fairness and commonsense.”

The letter was sent on the day the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky struck down the proposed Title IX regulations created by the outgoing Biden Department of Education.

The proposed rules would have added the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the existing categories of male and female when defining sex discrimination.

The court decision applies to all educational institutions that receive federal funding.

Adopting the name “Our Bodies, Our Sports (OBOS),” the coalition is demanding that the NCAA establish and enforce the right of female athletes to participate in sports based on biological sex.

The coalition wants the NCAA to repeal all policies and rules that allow male athletes to take roster spots on women’s teams and compete in women’s events.

Beyond the Ruling

OBOS is demanding the NCAA revoke all records set by male athletes competing in female sports and restore the female NCAA sports archives by erasing championship wins by teams with male players and those of individual male competitors.

Single-sex locker rooms for female athletes are also among the OBOS demands, as is restoring the Title IX guarantee of equal opportunity for the sexes—a concept they say was “gutted” by the Biden administration.

Adriana McLamb is a former collegiate women’s volleyball player who is now coaching and serving as a recruiting coordinator in Florida.

McLamb, an activist with the Independent Women’s Forum, told The Epoch Times that the timing of the court ruling was good for her movement and that the election of Trump was “pivotal.”

“The two events mark the beginning of the change back to commonsense. A male is a male and a female is a female,” she said.

“Though the fight is not over, we can see the end of men playing in women’s sports and women getting their locker rooms back. Protecting women’s spaces is not anti-trans. It is pro-woman,” McLamb said.

McLamb stated that banning males from women’s sports, revoking the records men set, and stripping championships from trans-identifying individuals or teams with trans-identifying players, was all about “protecting future female athletes and righting the wrongs of the past.”

Rachel Crandall-Crocker, executive director of TransMichigan, an LGBT advocacy group, told The Epoch Times that the proposed actions would be “absolutely discriminatory.”

Crandall-Crocker expects there will be protests and hopes that the court’s decision will be overturned on appeal.

At the close of the letter to Trump, the coalition writes, “We the undersigned represent thousands of female athletes and women’s advocacy groups from across the political spectrum.

“We stand together in honor of the generations of women who came before us and in defense of all the women and girls who will come next.

“We ask for your help in demanding that the NCAA finally act to restore fairness and opportunity in collegiate sports,” the letter said.

Some of the eleven signatories to the letter include the Independent Women’s Forum, Young Women for America, and the Women’s Liberation Front.

The NCAA and the office of the president-elect did not provide comment by publication time.

The Supreme Court has ruled that over 200 Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) judges were unconstitutionally appointed, however the problem may be ‘cured’ if the board’s director exercises greater supervision over them.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion in the split decision in the case of U.S. v. Arthrex Inc, a consolidation of three cases. The patent adjudication system is administered by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), which sits within the Department of Commerce. The PTO has a single director who is subject to Senate confirmation.

The PTAB was established by the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, and sits in panels of at least three members who are drawn from the Director, the Deputy Director, the Commissioners for Patents and Trademarks, and over 200 Administrative Patent Judges (APJs). Members of the PTAB and APJs are selected by the Secretary of Commerce.

As the Epoch Times notes further, Roberts explained that Arthrex Inc. develops medical devices and procedures for orthopedic surgery. In 2015, it received a patent on a surgical device it invented that reattaches soft tissue to bone without tying a knot. Arthrex soon claimed that two rival companies had infringed the patent. Three APJs on the PTAB panel concluded that a prior patent application “anticipated” the invention claimed by the patent, making Arthrex’s patent invalid.

On appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Arthrex raised for the first time an argument based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which provides that the president may appoint officers to assist him in carrying out his responsibilities. Principal officers must be appointed by the president and be confirmed by the Senate, while inferior officers may be appointed by the president alone, the head of an executive department, or a court.

Roberts noted that Arthrex argued that the APJs were principal officers and that meant their appointment by the Secretary of Commerce was unconstitutional. The Federal Circuit sided with Arthrex and invalidated the tenure protections for APJs.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that the authority the APJs possess runs afoul of the Appointments Clause because they are not nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The APJs’ “unreviewable authority” in patent proceedings is not consistent with their appointment by the secretary. Only principal officers who are constitutionally appointed may wield that level of authority, Roberts wrote. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett concurred.

But the court also ruled 7-2 on what should be done, finding that the constitutional infirmity could be cured by letting the director of the PTO have the ability to review and modify decisions made by the APJs. Four justices partially concurred and partially dissented in various parts of the court’s opinion.

Roberts quoted Alexander Hamilton who wrote in Federalist 77 that assigning the nomination power to the president guarantees accountability for the appointees’ actions because the “blame of a bad nomination would fall upon the president singly and absolutely.” The “sole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation,” the founding father wrote.

Roberts cited a 1997 precedent, writing that the Appointments Clause “adds a degree of accountability in the Senate, which shares in the public blame ‘for both the making of a bad appointment and the rejection of a good one.’”

Justice Clarence Thomas penned a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

“For the very first time, this Court holds that Congress violated the Constitution by vesting the appointment of a federal officer in the head of a department,” Thomas wrote.

“Just who are these ‘principal’ officers that Congress unsuccessfully sought to smuggle into the Executive Branch without Senate confirmation? About 250 administrative patent judges who sit at the bottom of an organizational chart, nestled under at least two levels of authority. Neither our precedent nor the original understanding of the Appointments Clause requires Senate confirmation of officers inferior to not one, but two officers below the President.” (Italics in original.)

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Vice President-elect JD Vance said on Jan. 12 that individuals who were violent during the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021, “obviously” should not be pardoned. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to use his clemency power for people who have been charged in connection to the incident over the past four years.

Those who “protested peacefully” on Jan. 6 should receive a pardon, Vance told Fox News. He added that there is also a “little bit of a gray area” in some of those cases.

“I think it’s very simple,” Vance elaborated.

“If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

More than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes in connection to the Capitol breach, according to records from the Department of Justice. A number of people were charged with misdemeanor offenses for entering the Capitol in an unauthorized manner, while some were charged with felonies.

Leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as plots to use violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to then-President-elect Joe Biden.

Vance said on Jan. 12 that he believes that “a lot of people” have been “prosecuted unfairly” over the past several years.

“We need to rectify that,” Vance said. “We’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”

Also on the morning of Jan. 12, Vance responded to critics on social media who said that his comments to Fox News didn’t go far enough, with some saying that all Jan. 6 defendants should be pardoned.

“I’ve been defending these guys for years,” Vance wrote on social media platform X.

“The president saying he’ll look at each case (and me saying the same) is not some walkback … I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.”

That comment came in response to a prominent conservative social media account’s statement on Jan. 12 that new footage has shown “cops shooting innocent J6 protesters and [Vance] goes on Fox News and tells the world that only non violent protesters should get pardoned … better rethink what you just said JD.”

Vance noted that he donated to a Jan. 6 “political prisoner fund” and was criticized over it during his run for Ohio’s Senate seat.

In a wide-ranging news conference last week at his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence, Trump suggested he would initiate “major pardons” for individuals arrested in the aftermath of Jan. 6.

A reporter asked him, “You said on your first day of office you were going to pardon Jan. 6 defendants. Are you planning to pardon those who were charged with violent offenses?”

“Well, we’re looking at it, and we have other people in there,” Trump said, adding that “people that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now.”

“We’ll be looking at the whole thing. But I’ll be making major pardons, yes,” he added.

The president-elect has said on multiple occasions that he would carry out the pardons quickly after he is sworn into office on Jan. 20.

Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has asked the U.S. government to consider new rules restricting U.S. biotech companies from conducting clinical trials with entities linked to the Chinese military.

In a Jan. 9 letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said the proposed restrictions will “help ensure U.S. biotechnology does not fall into the hands of the PRC,” referring to the acronym of communist China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

The letter, signed by Reps. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), chair and ranking member of the committee, respectively, along with Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), said biotech competition between the United States and the PRC “will not only have implications for our national and economic security, but also for the future of healthcare and the security of American medical data.”

The letter cites Beijing’s 14th Five-Year Plan—which “identifies dominance in biotechnology as critical to ’strengthen the PRC’s science and technological power’ and calls to deepen military-civil science and technology collaboration in the sector”—and a publication by a former president of the Chinese military’s National Defense University, which discussed the potential to create new synthetic pathogens that are “more toxic, more contagious, and more resistant.”

The lawmakers praised the proposals issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security in July 2024 to expand export controls to military and intelligence end users as “a welcome update.” They suggested the measures could be further strengthened by requiring a license to conduct clinical trials with medical institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

“Specifically, we recommend updating the definition of ‘Military End User’ to state medical infrastructure owned or operated by the national armed services of the PRC and other countries as appropriate constitutes a military end-use if a U.S. person is seeking to engage with the institution to conduct a clinical trial,” they added.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Commerce Department for comment and did not receive a response by publication time.

The letter is a sign of growing concern over China’s role in the biotechnology industry.

In August 2024, the same committee wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking the agency to ensure that U.S. clinical trials are not contributing to human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region or aiding the transfer of U.S. critical intellectual property to the PLA.

Citing official data, the letter said U.S. biopharmaceutical companies over the past decade had run hundreds of clinical trials that had at least one Chinese military entity among the research partners and conducted trials in hospitals in Xinjiang, “where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in genocide of the Uyghur population.”

In a response letter to the lawmakers dated Jan. 2, the FDA Acting Associate Commissioner for Legislative Affairs Laura Paulos said protections are in place for trial participants. 

“Given concerns regarding the human rights abuses occurring in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, FDA has publicly reiterated that (legislation) requires clinical trials to obtain the legally effective, informed consent of human subjects,” she wrote.

In response to concerns about intellectual property theft and technology transfer, Paulos referred the lawmakers to “appropriate U.S. federal agency partners.”

In addition to clinical trials, the committee has asked the Department of Defense (DOD) to add several Chinese biotech companies to its list of companies allegedly linked to the Chinese military. Two of these companies, Origincell and MGI Group, were added to the updated list on Jan. 7, along with dozens of others in sectors such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, drones, and shipping.

The DOD also included BGI Group, the parent company of MGI and BGI Genomics, which was previously designated as a Chinese military company, and another BGI subsidiary, Forensic Genomics International.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

President Joe Biden has shared his disapproval at Meta’s decision to do away with its current social media fact-checking program.

This week Meta, which owns the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, announced it would stop using its third-party fact-checking program for U.S.-based content review purposes.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he made the decision because the existing fact-checking program has become “too politically biased,” resulting in censorship and a loss of trust.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a Jan. 7 video statement.

Asked for his opinion on the move at a Jan. 10 press conference, Biden said, “It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about.”

Up until this week, Meta had partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to run its third-party fact-checking service. The IFCN is administered by the Poynter Institute, which also operates the PolitiFact fact-checking publication.

“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say ‘by the way from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything’ and you know when you have millions of people reading, going online reading this stuff it’s—anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.

Meta is not doing away with fact-checking outright. Rather, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms will move toward a “more comprehensive community notes” style system, similar to the one employed by social media platform X. He will start the new model in the United States.

Rather than relying on a fact-checking organization such as the IFCN to review content, X’s community notes feature allows users to weigh in directly. X users may suggest a fact-checking note on controversial posts on the platform, and then provide feedback on whether a suggested fact-checking note is itself accurate, and necessary for the particular post. Posts that have been flagged with sufficient community input display an attached fact-checking note explaining why the particular post is inaccurate or may be missing important context.

Zuckerberg also announced that Meta’s content moderation team will be moved out of California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Zuckerberg and other Meta officers have defended the move as needed to restore free speech and expression to their platforms.

In a Jan. 7 blog post, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said as well-intentioned as their prior fact-checking efforts had been, “they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users, and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” Kaplan said.

Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation decisions had been a point of contention during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

In October 2020, the Meta platforms reduced the reach of posts linking to articles by The New York Post concerning a laptop that then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The New York Post’s articles detailed the contents of the laptop, including documents indicating the elder Biden had some level of interaction with his son’s foreign business partners.

In a Jan. 10 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg alleged that officials in the Biden administration routinely contacted Meta, with demands that they remove or suppress certain content, including memes and satirical posts.

“Basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response by press time.

By Dhaval Joshi, chief strategist at BCA Research

Executive Summary

• In the developed economies excluding Japan, rising inflation expectations will lift them further above the 2 percent target. This will limit the scope for further interest rate cuts.
• But in Japan, rising inflation expectations will lift them up to the BoJ’s 2 percent target. This will remove the BoJ’s justification for its decades-long zero interest rate policy (ZIRP).
• The normalisation of Japan’s monetary policy poses a big risk to stocks because Japan has been the main source of financial market liquidity, and thereby, of rising stock market valuations.
• Hence, the biggest risk to US tech valuations comes from a rise in the Japanese real bond yield.
• On a structural (1-2 year) time horizon though, it is highly likely that Japanese real yields will rise, causing a meaningful setback in stocks versus bonds, and especially the US superstar stocks.
• But from a timing perspective, wait until the complexities of the price trends in USD/JPY and/or Nasdaq versus 30-year T-bond have reached the point of collapse that signalled previous reversals at the end of 2023 and the summer of 2024. You can monitor these indicators on our website.
• Go tactically long copper.

2024’s political Zeitgeist was encapsulated in what I have called the ‘3 I’s’: Incumbents punished for Inflation and Immigration.

Incumbent governments were given a kicking by furious electorates who had suffered a huge drop in their standard of living. And it made not the slightest difference whether the incumbents were left-of-centre Democrats in the US, centrist Macronists in France, or right-of-centre Conservatives in the UK.

In the case of excess immigration, the loss of well-being was feared. In the case of excess inflation, the loss of well-being was genuine. Yet since peaking in 2022 at close to 10 percent, inflation has plunged to the low-single digits. So, why is everybody still so angry?

It’s Cumulative Inflation That Matters

One of the main reasons that central banks target 2 percent inflation is that 2 percent is the highest rate of inflation that goes largely unnoticed. Going largely unnoticed, households and firms do not consciously factor sub-2 percent inflation into their price and wage setting processes. This prevents an ‘inflation spiral’ taking hold.

The reason that sub-2 percent inflation goes largely unnoticed is that economic productivity also tends to rise at 1-2 percent. And to the extent that wages rise in line with productivity, people will not suffer a loss of purchasing power when prices rise at 2 percent or below. So, the inflation goes unnoticed.

The thing that people notice and hate, is the cumulative loss of purchasing power when prices keep rising at above 2 percent.

Telling people that inflation is back down in the low-single digits will not make them feel any better when they have just suffered a cumulative loss of purchasing power of 25 percent!

It is this cumulative effect of past inflation that sets inflation expectations. As the charts in this report show, market expected 10-year inflation is nothing more than historic 10-year inflation (with a small tweak for the very recent inflation experience)

But what about survey-based inflation expectations? The answer is that survey-based inflation expectations like the University of Michigan consumer survey of 5–10-year US inflation expectations also track delivered long-run inflation (albeit, plus a constant).

Hence, to get cumulative inflation back to the 2 percent rate that is unnoticeable, inflation must fall below 2 percent to offset the post-pandemic period when inflation was running well above 2 percent. But as central banks are unlikely to take inflation much below 2 percent, inflation expectations – as a mathematical identity – will trend higher

Put more simply, inflation expectations will trend higher because the post-pandemic noticeable inflation era will become a greater part of our collective experience compared with the pre-pandemic unnoticeable inflation era.

Or, more precisely, inflation expectations will trend higher unless they cause a deflationary shock (or an exogenous deflationary shock arrives) that wrench them lower again. Such a shock might come from Japan.

Japanese Inflation Expectations Are Approaching Mission Accomplished

In the developed economies excluding Japan, rising inflation expectations will lift them further above the 2 percent target. This will limit the scope for further interest rate cuts, for two reasons. First, because it risks further un-anchoring those inflation expectations.

Second, because it is the real bond yield that matters for the economy. If inflation expectations rise, then nominal bond yields must also rise to achieve a given real stance of monetary policy. This means that bond yields will trend higher until the shock arrives that wrenches them lower. In Japan though, rising inflation expectations will lift them up to the BoJ’s 2 percent target.

Mission accomplished, it will remove the BoJ’s justification for its decades-long zero interest rate policy (ZIRP), especially with the real bond yield now deeply negative. It may sound perverse after decades of too low inflation, but once inflation is close to target, a deeply negative real bond yield risks taking Japanese inflation too high.

The Normalisation Of Japan’s Monetary Policy Poses A Big Risk To Stocks

The normalisation of Japan’s monetary policy poses a big risk to stocks because Japan has been the main source of financial market liquidity, and thereby, of rising stock market valuations.

Through 2019-2022, the Nasdaq’s valuation (earnings yield) moved in perfect lockstep with the US real bond yield, as might be expected. But in late-2022, the Nasdaq’s valuation detached from the US real yield and attached to the world’s last remaining negative real bond yield – in Japan.

Hence, through 2023-2024, the Nasdaq’s earnings yield has moved in near-perfect lockstep with the Japanese real bond yield. This means that the biggest risk to US tech valuations does not come from a rise in the US real bond yield. The biggest risk comes from a rise in the Japanese real bond yield. This also solves the seeming mystery as to why the US tech valuations have been largely unscathed by the recent surge in the US real bond yield. To reiterate, US tech valuations are not tracking the US real yield, they are tracking the Japanese real yield. US tech valuations have been largely unscathed because the Japanese real yield has not surged… yet.

On a structural (1-2 year) time horizon though, it is highly likely that Japanese real yields will rise. This will end the major source of financial market liquidity that is behind the powerful yet narrow 2023-24 surge in stock market valuations. On this structural (1-2 year) time horizon therefore, I expect a meaningful setback in stocks versus bonds, and especially the US superstar stocks.

But from a timing perspective, wait until the market has become too dovish on the BoJ and/or too bullish on the US superstar stocks. In other words, when the complexities of the price trends in USD/JPY and/or Nasdaq versus 30-year T-bond have reached the point of collapse that signalled previous reversals at the end of 2023 and the summer of 2024.

These excellent timing indicators are not yet flashing red. The good news is that you can monitor them updated daily on our website.

Go Tactically Long Copper

Finally, relating to trend changes among the major investments and sectors we monitor, there is a tactical buying opportunity for copper.

The recent sell-off in copper has reached the collapsed short-term complexity that has signaled stabilisations and rebounds through 2023-24.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly noted how once again the Democrat narrative that President Trump is a dangerous threat to Democracy doesn’t jive with the way they act around him, after Obama was seen chatting and laughing with Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

As we highlighted, the pair were seen sharing a cordial exchange after being seated together, with lip readers claiming that Trump asked Obama to meet somewhere quiet after the ceremony to discuss something important.

“I want people to remember what former President Obama was saying about Trump, literally, in October, okay, three months ago,” Kelly noted adding that Obama claimed Trump “wants Hitler’s generals to take over, and he’s genuinely dangerous.”

“Barack’s laughing, genuinely laughing, to where, like his body is shaking,” Kelly continued, commenting on the exchange between Obama and Trump.

“Hitler’s so funny. Hitler’s quite charming when you spend time with him, one on one,” Kelly further quipped.

Her guest Jesse Kelly commented, “Obama was the one who engineered the coup. He was the one who engineered the coup to get Joe Biden out of the White House. And not only did he engineer the coup to get Joe Biden out of the White House, he’s the one who vouched for Kamala Harris with his vast Donor Network, billionaire after billionaire after billionaire.”

“He knifed Joe Biden in the ribs, shoved him out the back of the White House and then picked up the phone and organised $1.5 billion to be given to Kamala Harris for her campaign, where she proceeded to not only embarrass herself the entire time, she embarrassed him.” Kelly further urged.

He further explained, “When you vouch for somebody with a bunch of billionaires and they flame out as badly as she flames out, well, he is not going to do that again. And without Barack Obama, without daddy Barack harrying her, Kamala Harris is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to be able to launch a significant presidential run again in her life.”

Watch:

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