Late Thursday night (local time), Turkey’s parliament approved Finland’s NATO application, which puts the Nordic country on the verge of formal membership in the Western military alliance as the 31st nation. This comes after on Monday Hungarian parliament ratified Finland’s for NATO membership.

The unanimous Turkish vote was the last hurdle in the process, after for months both Ankara and Budapest stalled the application – but in the case of Sweden it will be left behind, this despite the Finland-Sweden bids being initially launched as a package deal. Turkey’s relations with Sweden continue to be at a low-point, suggesting its application will not move forward for a Turkish vote anytime soon.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto hailed the news out of Turkey, saying his country is “now ready to join NATO.” He added: “All 30 NATO members have now ratified Finland’s membership. I want to thank every one of them for their trust and support. Finland will be a strong and capable ally, committed to the security of the Alliance.” NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg also issued a statement of congratulations on Twitter…

I welcome the vote of the Grand National Assembly of #Türkiye to complete the ratification of #Finland’s accession. This will make the whole #NATO family stronger & safer.

— Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) March 30, 2023

Earlier this month, the Kremlin weighed in on Finland being fast-tracked for entry, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying, “We have many times expressed regret over Finland and Sweden’s move toward membership and said many times that Russia does not pose a threat to these countries.”

“We do not have any dispute with these countries… They have never posed any threat to us and, logically, we did not threaten them,” Peskov added.

Finland meanwhile is building a 200km fence along its border with Russia to boost security, also after reporting that Russian men fled into Sweden by the droves in order to escape conscription. The fence will reportedly be 10 feet high and topped with barbed wire.

Sweden’s membership bid is expected to continue to stall, after deteriorating relations with Turkey in the wake of the Quran-burning incident by a far-right activist. Turkey has also demanded Swedish authorities crackdown on Kurdish political groups and operatives while alleging that Stockholm has hosted “terrorists” on its soil. But no matter what limited steps Sweden has taken thus far, none of its has satisfied Turkish leadership. 

Hungary too is expected to continue also blocking Sweden’s application for the time being. “Hungary is holding up Sweden’s admission to NATO because of grievances over criticism by Stockholm of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s policies, the Hungarian government spokesman said on Wednesday,” according to Reuters.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

Siegel threads together all the disparate strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a first great test case, the rise of a public-private “counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of things like elections, amid many other things.

He concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was “building a set of use cases” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”

More unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free.”

Both the actors in the Twitter Files and the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the “rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out) people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this political gardening metaphor to the smart set.

I asked Siegel a few questions about his mammoth publication, which happily he plans to expand to a book. The following is edited for length:

Matt Taibbi: How did you end up in Army intelligence?

Jacob Siegel: 9/11 is the short version of the story. I enlisted right after 9/11 and intelligence was probably a mistake (laughs). I ended up switching over into the infantry. So, I started in intelligence and then finished off in the infantry.

Matt Taibbi: Did you know anyone in intelligence who made the transition to anti-disinformation?

Jacob Siegel: Not in the intelligence world directly. But I was at the Daily Beast right when I got back from Afghanistan, and I quickly started covering digital culture, protest politics, weird internet ideology, and national security. I was writing about ISIS’s social media campaigns and talking to Clint Watts and talking to J.M. Berger, and taking what they were saying quite seriously at the time. I was watching that transition gradually into a rubric for understanding domestic politics in a way that – frankly – I wasn’t fully aware of what I was watching until probably a few years later. I would say I saw more of that counterterrorism-to-disinformation pipeline as a journalist than I did as an army officer.

Matt Taibbi: What gave you the idea to do this? It’s such a huge project.

Jacob Siegel: There are whole sections from this piece that come from a draft that I started working on in 2019. I think I submitted the first version of this in late 2020. So I’ve been working on this for a long time. I moved to Israel, my son was born, shit happens, you know… I just couldn’t quite bring it all together in the original version.

I wasn’t an immediate Russiagate skeptic. I didn’t see it and immediately think, “This is bullshit.” I saw it and thought to myself, “This is exaggerated… Adam Schiff is exaggerating, but he can’t be just lying like that (laughs) in public.” Really on a very fundamental level, in terms of my unquestioned premises, I was not capable of believing that an American national elected official could lie that brazenly, or that the intelligence agencies, which I knew to be corrupt and inefficient in a billion different ways, could be involved in a grand sort of conspiracy. It seemed too farfetched.

Adam Schiff is a weird guy to be responsible for lifting the veil, because he’s such a schmuck. But realizing that he just kept lying over and over, something clicked for me. Probably the next big turning point was the Russian bounty story. I wrote a piece on that for Tablet at the time, and there was no going back from that.

Matt Taibbi: What’s the reaction been to the new piece so far?

Jacob Siegel: I would say overall very positive, but also somewhat siloed. Broadly speaking, it’s gotten a great response, but it certainly hasn’t penetrated the liberal intelligentsia yet. It hasn’t penetrated the liberal mainstream at all. Maybe I have a somewhat blinkered view of that, but I had hoped that it would.

I don’t want to hang everything on the liberal gatekeepers, and politically, I’m not really clearly identified ideologically. I’m sometimes capable of slipping pieces through that get good receptions with various audiences over the years. And so I hope that would be the case here.

Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. has faced a challenging week. 

First, the US Air Force announced that the Lockheed Martin hypersonic weapons program would be terminated due to test failures. Now, the defense contractor faces significant software delays for its stealth fighter jets. Despite Washington elites showering the defense firm with significant amounts of taxpayer funds, its ability to develop and produce cutting-edge weaponry is encountering difficulties amid threats of global conflict. 

The latest news from Bloomberg highlights additional F-35 software delays by Lockheed for at least a year, making it 16 months behind schedule. The stealth fighter was set to receive a substantial technological upgrade, increasing processing power by 37 times and memory by 20 times, enabling it to carry more advanced weapons and enhance surveillance capabilities. 

Representative Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican, first disclosed the delays could last until April 2024. He said Wednesday at a House hearing:

“We’re learned that the late delivery is now impacting existing fighter squadrons” awaiting the upgraded F-35s.

“To quote a senior Air Force official I’ve met with on the subject: ‘We’re paying for great capability but we currently only have good capability,'” Wittman continued. 

“The F-35 is essentially a flying computer, with more than 8 million lines of code. The delayed software upgrade is known as TR-3,” Bloomberg said. 

Air Force Lieutenant General Michael Schmidt, F-35 program manager, told a House Armed Services subcommittee headed by Wittman that the TR-3 delivery schedule “has been affected by delays associated with hardware and software development as well as testing of the Integrated Core Processor — the brains of TR-3.”

“The key risks ahead of us are centered around maturity and stability of the final integrated software, flight test execution with an aging fleet of test aircraft and infrastructure and delivery of TR-3 hardware to the production line,” Schmidt said. 

The first F-35 equipped with the new software upgrade took flight in January. Around that time, readers might remember, an F-35 crashed at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth. It was suspected that the problem was related to the jet’s engine.

Besides the stealth fighter jet having hundreds of software and hardware flaws that could impact combat missions, Lockheed was busy this week with another significant issue: the UASF terminated its AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon hypersonic missile program after test failures. 

Investors could care less about the mounting issues Lockheed has come across with its stealth jets and hypersonic missile. 

While the US is at the forefront of developing and deploying stealth fighters and soon stealth bombers, the world’s largest military spender has yet to master hypersonic missile technology, a feat already achieved by Russia and China.

In February of this year Democrats and climate activists seized on a study published by a group called Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), and the conclusions of the paper sent alarmists into a frenzy – Claiming they had evidence that natural gas based appliances including gas stoves create emissions that are dangerous to human health, causing asthma and impairing cognitive development, specifically in children.  The Biden Administration’s Department of Energy reviewed the study and discussion mounted over the possibility of an incremental ban on various gas appliances, including up to 50% of gas stove models.      

The RMI study turned out to be yet another example of the political co-option of science as a weapon for the Net Zero agenda regularly touted by the United Nations, Democrats in the US and progressive politicians across Europe.

Almost immediately the findings of the study were debunked.  As the American Gas Association observed in a responding statement, the RMI testing did not include real life appliance usage, and:

“Ignored [previous] literature, including one study of data collected from more than 500,000 children in 47 countries that ‘detected no evidence’ of an association between the use of gas as a cooking fuel and either asthma symptoms or asthma diagnosis.”

Rather suspiciously, Biden’s Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, met privately with the leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Jules Kortenhorst, in 2021.  Around a year later, the institute produced a study which defies all previous science on the health risks of natural gas appliances and which serves the interests of Biden’s climate change policies.  Granholm would later throw support behind the findings of the RMI study, stating that:  

“We can and must FIX this…Through [President Biden’s] Inflation Reduction Act, Americans will have greater access to Electric and Induction Cooktops: keeps pollution out of the home. Cooks food faster. Helps families save money.”

It should also be noted that RMI has been the recipient of millions of dollars of DOE funding in the past, including a $4.4 million grant in March 2022.

As the truth about the RMI findings was revealed and the data found inadequate, pressure mounted from various groups, including conservatives, for the White House to abandon plans to restrict gas appliances.  The White House seemingly relented.  Democrats screeched about the “paranoia” of conservatives, asserting that no one was coming to take people’s gas stoves.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that:

“This is about a decision about what may be sold and regulations in the far future, OK? So everyone, just take the temperature down a little bit. No secret government agency is going to bust down your door and take your gas stove away…”

This kind of gaslighting (no pun intended) has become the standard response by Democrats when they are caught in a compromising position.  When a strategy falls apart, they assert that the attack never happened and it was all in our minds.  However, after the failure of Democrats to implement restrictions at the federal level, they have simply moved on to other avenues.  

The reality is that the RMI study was never about public health, it was only a means to frighten Americans into accepting climate change controls on petroleum and gas.  The plan is obvious – Start with something small, such as gas stoves or gas heat, and then use that as a springboard to eventually ban or tax all carbon based energy.

Multiple Democrat controlled cities and states are now instituting restrictions or timed bans on natural gas appliances, including San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Seattle and New York.  These cities are phasing out gas in new homes within the next 5 years.  California is planning to phase out gas appliances by 2030.  The state of New York under Kathy Hochul is nearing a deal to ban gas appliances in new homes by 2025.  As is often the case, progressive cities and states tend to act as test cases for future bans at the national level.

To get insight into what climate change authoritarians intend for the US in the future, one need only look at Europe and the UK.  In Britain, households are to be financially penalized if they do not switch away from gas under net zero policies to be unveiled soon.

The UK secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said:  “If we want people to switch to an electricity-based economy, it would be better if [levies] were shifted onto the gas side of things…It automatically makes the economics of an electric-driven economy better.”

In the US, over 38% of all households rely on natural gas for energy.  In states like California it is estimated that energy usage would have to plummet (along with living standards) if all homes used electricity only.  For global carbon standards to be met, climate scientists argue that population growth will have to stop, and over time human numbers would have to be systematically reduced through birth control methods.  

Setting aside the fact that climate science is itself rooted in numerous inaccuracies and fallacies, the logistics of shifting the population away from oil and gas energy are impossible without placing massive strain on existing electrical grids and destabilizing the economy.  This is perhaps why Democrats and climate alarmists often lie about their intentions and use subversion and incrementalism to enact policy – They don’t want to be forced to admit the true cost of their Net Zero world and risk a furious response from the public.  

Update (1827ET):

Trump has responded to the lawsuit, saying in a statement: “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.”

Full statement:

‘This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history. From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, and even before I was sworn in as your President of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats – the enemy of the hardworking men and women of this Country – have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement. You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

‘The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.

“Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done. The Democrats have cheated countless times over the decades, including spying on my campaign, but weaponizing our justice system to punish a political opponent, who just so happens to be a President of the United States and by far the leading Republican candidate for President, has never happened before. Ever.

“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on. This is how Bragg spends his time!

“I believe this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden. The American people realize exactly what the Radical Left Democrats are doing here. Everyone can see it. So our Movement, and our Party – united and strong – will first defeat Alvin Bragg, and then we will defeat Joe Biden, and we are going to throw every last one of these Crooked Democrats out of office so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley opined on the indictment in a Thursday interview with Fox News.

“Bragg reportedly has secured his indictment. He has made history, but it is an inglorious moment where even some on the left have criticized the effort.  This is a patently political prosecution. Bragg and NY AG James ran on bagging Trump. This has fulfilled that pledge but, if the indictment follows the course described in coverage, it is deeply flawed theory. We will have to wait to see the indictment. …The objection is not to the prosecuting of a misdemeanor but the reported effort to extend the statute of limitations under an unprecedented bootstrapping theory. We have not heard of an alternative criminal theory.

Jonathan Turley on the indictment of President Trump:

“It’s rather outrageous. It’s legally pathetic.”pic.twitter.com/fDn1D0f0fx

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 30, 2023

*  *  *

A Manhattan Grand Jury has voted to indict former President Donald Trump over hush money paid to former porn star Stormy Daniels, according to the NY Times, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The still-sealed felony indictment, which comes as 2024 campaign season comes into focus, makes Trump the first former president in US history to face criminal charges.

The exact charges are not yet known, however the Times expects them to be announced in the coming days by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Prosecutors working for DA Alvin L. Bragg will ask Trump to surrender and face arraignment on said unknown charges.

[U]nlike the investigations that arose from his time in the White House, this case is built around a tawdry episode that predates Mr. Trump’s presidency. The reality star turned presidential candidate who shocked the political establishment by winning the White House now faces a reckoning for a hush money payment that buried a sex scandal in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

Mr. Trump has consistently denied all wrongdoing and attacked Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, accusing him of leading a politically motivated prosecution. He has also denied any affair with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who had been looking to sell her story of a tryst with Mr. Trump during the campaign. –NY Times

The move also comes just before the grand jury takes a one-month break until late April.

Interestingly, as The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, this month-long delay came after an attorney in former President Donald Trump’s orbit who testified in front of a Manhattan grand jury earlier this month believes that there has been a shift in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against the 45th president.

“Well, I think I got through to them, because [Monday] I understand they called back another witness by the name of David Pecker, who used to run the National Enquirer,” Costello, a former Michael Cohen attorney, told Newsmax on Tuesday.

“Basically, what they’re doing is really gerrymandering this,” he said of Bragg’s probe into Trump.

Costello said he had represented Cohen, himself a former Trump lawyer, and told reporters last week that he does not believe Cohen is a credible witness against Trump.

Sounds like that wasn’t the case.

The prosecution’s star witness in the case is former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about sleeping with Trump. Cohen said that Trump directed him to buy her silence (contrary to a 2018 letter from his lawyer claiming the opposite), and says that the Trump organization helped cover it up.

The case brought by Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, is far from a sure bet. Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., and federal prosecutors each passed on charging Mr. Trump in a stand-alone case related to the hush money. If the case goes to trial, a conviction would almost certainly require a jury to credit the testimony of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who has faced his own legal troubles and pleaded guilty to an array of federal felonies in 2018. Among them was a campaign-finance offense for the porn-star payment, as well as charges of lying to a bank and to Congress. -WSJ

Meanwhile, this didn’t age well…

Did Alvin Bragg just make Trump into even more of a martyr?

If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023

As Techno Fog writes via The Reactionary…

The indictment is an absolute scandal, the banana republic on parade, the prosecutor using the weapons of his office to attack his political opponent.

Bragg and his predecessor’s slow-walking of the investigation, with its inception by Manhattan DA goes back to 2019, evidences both the dubious nature of the case against Trump and the political motivations for prosecuting Trump. Theoretically, this should be a simple case. Yet the investigation went on for nearly five years, despite what they’ve possessed: overzealous prosecutors who wanted to charge Trump with racketeering, the cooperating witnesses, the likely millions of pages of materials from the Trump Organization.

Now suddenly, the insanely pro-criminal Manhattan DA, who demanded his prosecutors reduce charges for violent criminals, is prioritizing law and order. It’s hard to believe there are legitimate reasons – for prosecutors, that means seeking justice – for that transformation. Why bring the case now? It’s the start of the 2024 presidential campaign season.

You can’t help but think of the political calculations that went on in Bragg’s head. Not only does he benefit personally, now elevated to a liberal folk hero after being the prosecutor to finally get Trump (a campaign promise he keeps), but this throws a grenade into the Republican race. Will the GOP base rally to Trump? How will the other candidates respond?

And what will this do for the undecideds and the independents and the swing voters – those who are essential to victory in 2024? 

Some of those questions will be answered in the short term. Some of them won’t be answered until election day, assuming Trump gets the GOP nod.

That’s because the case won’t go away. It’s illegitimate and political, but it’s here to stay for the time being. Don’t be surprised if the trial date is set for the first half of 2024. And don’t understate the danger to Trump, who will face a jury of Biden voters. Biden won Manhattan 86.7% to 12.3% according to the New York Times. The jury of Trump’s peers will be friendly to the prosecution. That’s all the Manhattan DA might need to secure a conviction. Trump could very well win on appeal but the damage – which carries national repercussions – might already have been done.

And that’s the whole point of this dirty scheme.

Click here to subscribe to The Reactionary

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Twitter has restricted multiple accounts belonging to prominent conservatives in recent days after they posted about  an upcoming rally called the “Trans Day of Vengeance.”

On Tuesday, the Elon Musk-owned company restricted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) congressional account for seven days after she repeatedly posted an image of a poster about the rally. In the same post, Greene alleged that Antifa was organizing the event, which is being hosted by the Trans Radical Activist Network.

After her congressional account was restored by Twitter, Greene issued another post from the account that read, “My Congressional Twitter account was suspended today. @elonmusk, how is it ‘violent speech’ to expose the ‘Trans Day of Vengence’ [sic] a day after a mass murder committed by a transgender shooter? And to call on the DOJ to investigate it? I condemned the incitement to violence & demanded a federal law enforcement investigation in the Tweet.”

Her account was then promptly suspended for seven days.

Yesterday, my official Twitter account was termporarily suspended for warning about Antifa’s Trans Day of Vengeance in front of the Supreme Court.

This planned event is being whitewashed by global brands and the left. Meanwhile, there’s still no acknowledgement of the innocent… pic.twitter.com/666WRD9EZX

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 29, 2023

“My Congressional account was suspended for 7 days for exposing Antifa, who are organizing a call for violence called ‘Trans Day of Vengeance,’” Greene said in a post on her personal Twitter account on Tuesday. “The day after the mass murder of children by a trans shooter.”

Following the ban, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, said on Twitter that the platform is removing images of the poster due to concerns that it could incite violence.

“We had to automatically sweep our platform and remove >5000 tweets /retweets of this [‘Trans Day of Vengeance’] poster,” Irwin wrote. “We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organizing or support for peaceful protests is ok.”

More Accounts Restricted

Elsewhere, The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis was reportedly locked out of his account for allegedly violating Twitter’s rules regarding “violent speech.”

Prior to the account block, Davis had posted: “The cold-blooded mass murder at a Christian school in Nashville by an apparent transgender person came just days before a planned ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ organized by the Trans Radical Activist Network.”

According to the publication, Twitter has already taken down the tweet but informed Davis his account will remain locked until he manually deletes himself.

Davis reportedly filed an appeal with Twitter to reinstate his account but the platform rejected it, meaning he is permanently banned from accessing his account until he removes the tweet in question.

“This is deliberate censorship and gaslighting designed to memory-hole the FACT that the Nashville shooter targeted and murdered Christian children and teachers just days ahead of a scheduled ‘Trans Day of Vengeance,” Davis said in a statement. “Twitter is lying about the facts and defaming those of us who reported on them.”

Sean Davis, our @FDRLST CEO who has been locked out of his account for reporting accurately about a rally writes about what the latest censorship campaign means. “Twitter Cannot Be Saved. It’s Time For Free Speech Proponents To Let It Die”: https://t.co/iXlafNUDHp @elonmusk

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 29, 2023

Daily Wire journalist Luke Rosiak was also suspended from Twitter on Tuesday after he posted a link about the event, according to the publication.

Twitter removed a post from Rosiak linking to an article he wrote earlier this month about the activists organizing the event.

“The shooting of a Christian school by a transgender comes the same week that activists scheduled a ‘Trans Day of Vengeance,’ with the group also raising money for firearms training,” the post read.

Twitter told Rosiak that the post violated “rules against violent speech.”

I was locked out of my account yesterday for tweeting a transgender day of vengeance ad. https://t.co/D9h0JOTiZW

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) March 29, 2023

We were locked out of our account for this tweet. It linked to our reporting about a “trans day of vengeance” that was being organized by far-left activists. @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/hns06UKKg0

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 28, 2023

Police Say Nashville Shooter Was Transgender

“He was told that he must delete the original post to regain access to his account; he appealed the decision, observing that he was not ‘advocating for violence’ but rather ‘stating a fact and noting disapprovingly’ that others had been calling for violence,” the Daily Wire reported.

Elsewhere, Journalist and author Andy Ngo was reportedly locked out of his Twitter account for reporting on the upcoming event.

Trans Radical Activist Network still retains its account on Twitter, although its tweets are protected, meaning only approved followers can see content posted on the account.

According to its official website, the Trans Radical Activist Network is a “nationwide network of activists and community organizers for transgender/non-binary rights.”

“The Trans/Non-Binary/Gender Non-Conforming/Intersex communities are facing astronomical amounts of hate from the world. At least a 100 Gender Affirming care ban bills have been proposed,” the website states. “So far in 2023, 12 lives have been lost, [sic] 2022 we lost over 60 people. Our community has a stigma attached and significantly impacts marginalized communities at a higher intensity. There are members of our own communities that have turned against the true meaning of Pride,” it adds.

The Trans Day of Vengeance is scheduled for April 1, according to the website, just days after 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who police say identified as transgender, opened fire at Covenant Christian Academy, shooting dead three children and three adults.

However, the organizers note that the protest is “about unity, not inciting violence” and adds that it does “not encourage violence and it is not welcome at this event.”

Trans activists have also noted that the “trans day of vengeance” is a meme that has been around in the trans community for years and is not a call to violence, The Associated Press reports.

As required by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) auctioned oil and gas drilling rights across 73.4 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico despite the Biden administration’s pledge to end new leasing as part of climate change initiatives. 

According to BOEM, 32 companies participated in the Gulf of Mexico Lease Sale 259, submitting $309,798,397 in total bids. Reuters pointed out that Chevron Corp, ExxonMobil Corp, and BP Plc were among the top bidders. 

The Guardian said the size of Lease 259 is comparable in size to Italy. 

The auction was a requirement in President Biden’s IRA, which safeguards federal oil and gas leasing and mandates lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico by the end of March. 

Revenues received from offshore oil and gas leases will be paid to US Treasury, Gulf Coast states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) and local governments, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and the Historic Preservation Fund. 

The auction comes weeks after Biden authorized a large ConocoPhillips oil project in northwest Alaska.

A little awkward, considering he has pledged during the election campaign: “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuels.”

New oil and gas developments in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska have infuriated climate activists:

“For the first half of his presidency, Joe Biden led on climate with transformative vision but in the second half he seems to be signaling a disastrous climate U-turn,” Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club and a prominent progressive, said.

For instance, Alaska’s $8 billion Willow oil field development project has a 30-year lifespan. The projects in the Gulf also have years, if not more than a decade, lifespan. The notion that Biden wants to ban oil and gas is ‘malarkey,’ and his staunchest climate supporters are getting wind the president is failing on his word. 

“If he’s making a political calculation, he’s making a wrong one. He’s breaking a major promise on drilling and by going back on his word he will inspire many young people to stay at home rather than voting in 2024. His decisions appear to be rooted in the political and economic calculus of the last century, not this one,” Jealous added. 

Authored by Eric Utter via American Thinker (emphasis ours),

According to a depressing new poll from The Wall Street Journal, belief in the importance of traditional American values has plummeted in the United States in recent decades.

The poll queried U.S. respondents about the importance of patriotism, religious faith, having children and other traditionally American values in their lives. Only 39% of Americans surveyed said their religious faith is very important to them, and just 38% said patriotism is very important.

The Journal compared those numbers to the results from the first time it ran the poll in 1998… when 62% of Americans said religion was very important to them, and 70% said patriotism was. And that was during the Clinton administration!

So, apparently, a majority of Americans no longer believe either religion or patriotism is important.

If that is the case, Democrats will never be out of power again. They never tire of dissing the country, its founders…and the concept of objective truth, morality…and God. (“Male and female He made them? Screw that, I decide if I am male or female…or any other gender, including ones I make up out of whole cloth!”)

Remarkably, the survey also purported to find that a plurality of Americans believe the U.S. has not gone far enough in promoting equality between men and women, accepting people who are gay, lesbian or bisexual, or in promoting racial and ethnic diversity in business and universities. If we go any further down that road, no one but members of the BIPOC LGBTQ Community will ever again be allowed to head a company or attend college.

The results of this poll, if they are reasonably accurate depictions of Americans’ values, or lack thereof, are disheartening to say the least. If, essentially, 23% of Americans lost their belief in a higher power, and 32% lost their belief in the goodness of their country in just the past 25 years…it is time to turn out the lights, as the party is unquestionably over.

The founders knew this was a distinct possibility at some point. John Adams famously observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” This is one reason “progressives” disdain them so. They disdain the very concepts of morality and religion, as they tend to put boundaries on people’s behavior. A God would be competition for them, and that they cannot countenance.

Conservatives, on the other hand, wish to conserve the best of the past, and pass on the accrued wisdom and best practices of millennia past. (We are not reflexively against change, such as voting Democrats out of office, potentially eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, defunding National Public Radio, proposing school choice and voucher initiatives, or re-funding the police.)

It is no coincidence that testosterone and sperm levels have fallen during this same period. Or that IQs have declined, too. It all ties together. As Andrew Breitbart averred, it is true that politics is downstream from culture. And the current cultural cesspool feeds the stream that flows through—and poisons—our political class.

Objectively, this leads to one inescapable conclusion: sickeningly, the incessant lies that “progressive” Democrats—and their sycophantic lapdogs in the mainstream media—have told the American people…have been effective. Bullshit is viable.

Indoctrination works.

For the third day in a row (ahead of tomorrow’s month- and quarter-end and the big PCE print), bonds ‘rested’ while stocks went wild (this time up… and then back down). Gold rallied as the dollar and bitcoin sold off.

Regional bank stocks slipped back towards the post-SVB lows again, back into the red for the week (not helped by Biden pushing for tighter regs for this cohort) ahead of tonight’s Fed bailout data…

FRC was weak today and SCHW fell on an analyst downgrade joining PACW in the red for the week…

Source: Bloomberg

Minnesota Fed’s Kashkari opened his mouth around 1330ET and hawkish tones gushed forth, pushing stocks lower.

Richmond Fed’s Barkin was more dovish at around 1400ET, hinting at credit tightening (which may reduce needs for hikes) and that policy has lags (hinting at a pause).

Nasdaq outperformed… again… with Small Caps lagging (actually closing in the red on the day). The Dow and S&P rebounded (after Barkin) back into the green on the day…

And as the quarter-end nears, it’s clear what’s driving the exuberance in long-duration stocks…

Nasdaq heads for one of its best quarters in a decade, up 17% in Q1. Second only to 2022’s Q2 30% rally on the monumental monetary easing during Covid. Both times, the Fed’s balance sheet expanded. Latest 10% leg up on the Nasdaq coincided with Fed’s balance sheet adding $400bn pic.twitter.com/na34YcyIwr

— Valerie Tytel (@ValerieTytel) March 30, 2023

‘Most Shorted’ Stocks squeezed higher at the open once again (to key resistance) but were sold back to unch from there…

Source: Bloomberg

Options traders have priced in a lot of (relative) uncertainty for tomorrow (PCE), but then a jolt lower before rising again into next week’s payrolls…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were modestly lower on the day with the belly outperforming (5Y -3bps) but all yields are still up notably on the week…

Source: Bloomberg

The 10Y yield continued to sleep after its explosion higher Friday thru Monday on the back of a suddenly heavy calendar of issuance…

Source: Bloomberg

The yield curve (2s10s) flattened for the 4th straight day…

Source: Bloomberg

Rate-hike odds picked up hawkishly again today, with May now at 55% odds of 25bps hike…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar dumped again to its lowest close since Feb 3rd…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin slipped back below $28,000 today (after spiking above $29 k overnight)..

Source: Bloomberg

Gold (June futures) topped $2000 once again, as spot jumped back above $1980…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices extended their gains with WTI (May is front-month) back above $74 at two-week highs…

And finally, we note that US equities still screen as expensive vs. the alternatives despite the recent decline in Treasury yields…

Source: Bloomberg

And the S&P 500 NTM P/E of 18x ranks in the 82nd percentile since 1980…

Source: Bloomberg

Do you feel lucky punk?

Given that, maybe you should!

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

I recently wrote a column on how Democrats in California are being challenged to put their money where their mouth has been on reparations.

For years, Democrats have insisted that reparations are a moral imperative.

Now, however, the bill has come due and advocates in a Wednesday hearing confronted members of the California Reparations Task Force in asking “where’s the money?” Some are now demanding more than $5 million per resident as Reparations Board member Lisa Holder of the Equal Justice Society promised that the committee’s “recommendations will be breathtaking.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) created the Reparations Task Force, which just reached its own recommendations for $223,000 per person. Others have insisted the figure should be $350,000 for individuals and another $250,000 for Black-owned businesses. One California politician insisted the figure needs to be $800,000 per person, reflecting the average cost of a home in the state. In the meantime, a similar board has recommended $5 million payments to eligible residents of San Fransisco.

Notably, California’s law expressly states that this money should not be treated as compensation for federal reparations.

That raises the question of whether a resident could receive $5 million from San Francisco, $223,000 from the state, and additional payments from the federal government.

[ZH: As Eric Lundrum writes at AMGreatness, after economists estimated that California’s reparations plan could spend as much as $800 billion, the leader of the state’s “reparations task force” has refused to commit to such a staggering amount.

According to ABC News, the $800 billion figure would be paid to all black residents in the state in return for past historical circumstances such as slavery and segregation, as well as alleged “racism” in policing, incarceration rates, and housing.

“All forms of discrimination should be considered in reparations,” said Thomas Craemer, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut, in testimony before the panel.

“The task force should feel free to go beyond our loss estimates, and determine what the right amount would be.”

But on Wednesday, the task force’s chair, Kamilah Moore, said the final decision on the exact amount will be left up to the California state legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.).

“The task force is pretty much done regarding the compensation component,” Moore said in an email.

“Our task was to create a methodology for calculation for various forms of compensation that correspond with our findings.”]

Some congressional Democrats have pushed for similar federal reparations and passed a bill out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021 that failed to receive a floor vote. BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations.

In the hearing on Wednesday, the growing expectation and impatience was evident among witnesses. Yet, some reparations advocates in cities with even smaller reparation programs admit that they do not know how cities will fund the payouts.

One witness described the payments of $5 million per person as “nothing” and “too little.” The correct figure was suggested as more like $7.6 million.

Reverend Tony Pierce asked “Where’s the money? Where’s the cash? Where’s the check?” “$5 million, San Francisco’s already made a move. $5 million is nothing.” Pierce mocked the notion of $5 million if it is “spread over 50 years would only amount to $100,000 year, and then with taxes, you’ll be lucky if you end up with $40,000 a year.”  He also rejected the notion of $223,000 for housing as woefully inadequate.

For her part, Holder is pledging breathtaking” reparation payments, including “monetary compensation to Black people who are descendants of enslaved and persecuted Black Americans.”

Those continued assurances are fueling demands for the money without further delay. After years of being told that the payments are moral imperatives, many are losing patience. In a prior hearing, one well-known California activist declared in a prior hearing that “It’s a debt that’s owed, we worked for free. We’re not asking; we’re telling you.”

Despite Gov. Newsom’s underestimating the state debt figures by billions, this bill has now come due and many critics are challenging the left to show that the prior pledges were not mere political opportunism or virtue signaling.

California is set to face the true costs of these pledges and many are in no mood to haggle over price.

In other words, California Democrats may have finally reached the “show me the money” moment.