fox files

On Dec. 13, President Joe Biden’s (D) newly established White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention hosted nearly 100 Democrat lawmakers from 39 states to encourage them to pass more-restrictive firearms laws.

“The agenda is not comprehensive, but highlights actions that states can take to achieve meaningful progress in the next year,” claims an eight-page brochure titled the “Safer States Agenda.”

“In the months ahead, the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention will work with states to make sure they have the resources needed to advance this life-saving agenda,” says the brochure.

Chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, participants got to witness, firsthand, one of Harris’ favorite and most-often told lies: “We’re up against some who would suggest a false choice. That is that you are either favoring the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. I’ll speak for myself: I am absolutely in favor of the Second Amendment. And I’m also in favor of an assault-weapons ban.”

Not surprisingly, the first recommendation in the brochure is to “Establish a State Office of Gun Violence Prevention.”

“A state Office of Gun Violence Prevention—equipped with clear mandate and experienced personnel—can coordinate resources and accelerate implementation,” the brochure states. “State offices should have sufficient authority to: (a) coordinate across state agencies and with local and federal governments; (b) build gun violence data collection and analysis capacity; (c) develop and implement comprehensive strategies for addressing various types of gun violence; and (d) develop and implement a state plan to prevent targeted violence and effectively respond to incidents of mass shootings and surges in other forms of gun violence.”

Along with suggestions, like investing in alleged solutions to prevent and respond to “gun violence,” the state plan includes several recommendations that would directly infringe on gun owners’ rights.

Under the heading of “Reinforce Responsible Gun Ownership,” the administration’s recommendations overreach rather than reinforce. Those recommendations include passing so-called “safe storage” laws, penalizing those who don’t immediately report a lost or stolen firearm, and pushing for so-called “red-flag” laws that allow a judge to order the confiscation of firearms without due process.

Of course, the administration used the brochure to push “enhanced” background checks for those 18 to 20 years old who want to purchase a firearm. “Universal” background checks were also on the list, even though every licensed gun dealer in the United States—whether in a shop, online, or at a gun show—is required to run a federal background check for any firearm sold.

“States across the country have enacted universal background check legislation to close this loophole and extend the background check requirement to private sales,” the brochure states. “More states should follow suit.”

Additionally, under the header “Hold the Gun Industry Accountable,” Biden called for a ban on many, if not most, common semi-automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns, along with outlawing standard-capacity firearm magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

“In addition to banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, states should ban the possession of un-serialized firearms, often referred to as ‘ghost guns,’” the brochure states.

Lastly, the administration sought to enlist the help of anti-gun state lawmakers in its continued attempt to weaken or repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).  

“The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a federal law that provides gun manufacturers and gun dealers with more protection from legal liability than tobacco companies and alcohol companies,” the brochure states. “This law denies many victims of gun violence their day in court, and prevents the public from holding bad actors accountable for their potentially dangerous design, marketing and sales practices.”

Of course, Biden is fond of repeating this lie again and again and has been doing so long before he became president. This oatmeal for brains in the WH has lied his entire career and no doubt his entire life. His assertion that the law gives “blanket immunity” to gun manufacturers has been proven false time and again, with even The Washington Post fact checkers saying the claim is not true.

In fact, the law was passed to prevent frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers for the criminal use of legally produced, safe, and lawfully sold products. Manufacturers can be sued for negligence if they make products that are deemed unsafe and not protected from civil litigation if they violate existing laws.

Interestingly, even the Biden administration knows that to be true. Biden’s own attorney general, Merrick Garland, testified under oath before Congress that the PLCAA is constitutionally sound, despite the rhetoric coming from the White House and the gun-ban lobby.

“That’s the position the Justice Department takes,” Garland said in response to a question about the PLCAA. “Whether we like the statute or not, we defend the constitutionality of Congress’s work.”

It would be nice if I were able to report that the people who run our sprawling federal government are taking seriously their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but, unfortunately, I can write no such thing. Once upon a time, American presidents established offices to defend Americans’ constitutional rights. Nowadays, they do the opposite. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to set up a “Disinformation Governance Board” that was tasked with monitoring Americans’ speech. After massive pushback, the initiative failed. But, alas, the idea did not. In September of this year, President Biden announced that he would be setting up “the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.” Again, the call is coming from inside the house.

In its press release describing the new department, the White House made sure to use all the right buzzwords and euphemisms, referring to “gun violence prevention,” to “commonsense actions” and to its supposed desire to “keep communities safe.” But, as ever, the proof is in the details, and the details make it clear that Joe Biden’s new office is interested in nothing more sophisticated than leveraging the same network of interest groups that promoted his anti-gun candidacy to push for the same set of unconstitutional gun-control measures as the president has called for elsewhere.

Among the figures who have been tapped to head up the board are Vice President Kamala Harris, who has suggested that the president of the United States can unilaterally confiscate firearms; Rob Wilcox, an activist with Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control group, Everytown; and Greg Jackson, an activist with the “public health”-driven gun-control group, Community Justice Action Fund.

And among the measures that they have been tasked with pushing for are “banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines” (read: prohibiting the most commonly owned rifles in America and making standard-issue magazines illegal); “requiring background checks for all gun sales” (read: creating a federal gun-registry and micromanaging all firearms transfers, including those within the same state and between relatives); and “eliminating gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability” (read: lying about the existing law and trying to achieve, via frivolous lawsuits, what cannot be achieved via the political process).

Meet the new gun-control push; same as the old gun-control push.

Familiar though it may seem, Americans ought to be concerned by this development. First, the fact that the president is choosing to spend his limited political capital in this area is illustrative of his continued zeal. Biden has a disastrously low approval rating, is underwater on almost every important issue and is presiding over crises in the economy, at the southern border and in global affairs. That his focus remains on pushing gun control ought to tell us something important about his priorities.

Worse still, Biden is hinting at exactly how he wishes to use his new group in the future. Having boasted that he has “taken more executive action” restricting the Second Amendment “than any president in history,” Biden confirmed that he will “continue to urge Congress” to pass his agenda, but that “in the absence of that sorely needed action, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention along with the rest of my administration will continue to do everything it can.” Given this president’s total disregard for the limits on his constitutional authority, these words ought to alarm anyone who cares about the integrity of the law.

Despite its official-sounding title, it must be remembered that Biden’s “office” is not an agency that has been approved and staffed by Congress, but a bunch of political partisans sitting around a desk. It must be treated as such. And, once its plan has been defeated, the next president must consign it to history. 

Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022, the lower courts have been either trying to apply, or to resist, its directive to decide the validity of restrictions on the basis of the text of the Second Amendment and historical analogues from the time of the Founding. According to the ruling, an activity is presumed to be protected if it involves keeping and bearing arms by the people. The burden is then on the government to find historical precedents to show that a restriction is part of the nation’s history and tradition.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals applied Bruen to the federal ban on gun possession by a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order (DVRO) and found it to violate the Second Amendment. State DVROs are often issued with little pretense of an adversary hearing or are mutually agreed upon in divorces without knowledge that it evokes a federal gun ban.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, U.S. v. Rahimi, and a barrage of amicus briefs have been filed on both sides. Mr. Rahimi faces several state charges involving actual violence, dwarfing the federal possession charge. The amicus brief of the National Rifle Association put it this way: “Rahimi should not only lose his Second Amendment liberties, but he should also lose all of his liberties—if the allegations against him are ultimately proven true with sufficient due process. But constitutional safeguards cannot be set aside to obtain those ends.”

Consider the supposed historical analogues cited by Biden’s Justice Department and its amici—discriminatory laws disarming Catholics, slaves and “tramps”; confiscation of arms by oppressive British monarchs and by our own patriots in the American Revolution (there was a war going on, after all); and wholly irrelevant laws against gun sales to children and intoxicated persons. The Court heard oral arguments in the case on Nov. 7, 2023.

The Third Circuit, in Range v. Merrick Garland, held the federal ban on gun possession by felons to be unconstitutional as applied to a person convicted of a minor, non-violent offense.  Again, no laws in the Founding era disarmed persons who were not dangerous. The government is asking the Supreme Court to hear that case after it decides Rahimi.

When it decided Bruen, the Supreme Court directed the Fourth Circuit to reconsider its upholding of Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Bianchi v. Frosh. That court had held that ordinary AR-15 semi-automatic rifles are not really different from machineguns and are “weapons of war most useful in military service,” even though no military force in the world issues them as service rifles.

The Fourth Circuit got right on it, holding its oral argument on Dec. 6, 2022. A year later, crickets. Still no decision. Is it really so hard to apply Bruen’s simple tests, or would the court not like the result?

Another “assault-weapon” case is pending in the Seventh Circuit, involving the recent ban passed by the state of Illinois and similar ones passed by Illinois localites. In the Bevis case, a Chicago court denied a preliminary injunction based on the “particularly dangerous” nature of ordinary AR-15s. In Barnett v. Raoul, the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois issued a preliminary injunction based on the Supreme Court’s “common-use” test, but the court of appeals reversed it. So, the Illinois ban remains in limbo.

Now on to the reliably anti-gun Ninth Circuit. When it decided Bruen, the Supreme Court told the Ninth, flat out, to reconsider Duncan v. Bonta, in which the Ninth upheld California’s magazine ban. The court could have easily invalidated the ban, but instead sent it back down yet again for reconsideration by District Judge Roger Benitez. After a trial, Judge Benitez again held the magazine ban unconstitutional, this time in a 71-page opinion, and issued a permanent injunction against its enforcement.

The Ninth Circuit, en banc, stayed the injunction except as to the possession ban on magazines lawfully acquired before the lower court’s order. Dissenting, Judge Lawrence VanDyke wrote, “The story of the Second Amendment in this circuit has been a consistent tale of our court versus the Supreme Court and the Constitution. That tale continues today, and will continue as long as a number of my colleagues retain the discretion to twist the law and procedure to reach their desired conclusion.”

When it decided Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the Fourth Circuit to reconsider its upholding of Maryland’s “assault weapon” ban in Bianchi v. Frosh. The Fourth Circuit held its oral argument on December 6, 2022. A year later, crickets. Still no decision. Is it really so hard to apply Bruen’s simple tests?

The Ninth Circuit also remanded Miller v. Bonta back to Judge Benitez, who earlier found California’s ban on “assault weapons” violative of the Second Amendment. The judge again invalidated and enjoined the prohibition on such commonly possessed rifles, and the state is off to the Ninth. Déjà vu all over again.

California bans the retail sale of semi-automatic pistols that do not have a chamber-load indicator, a magazine-disconnect mechanism and microstamping capability (a futuristic design in which the firing pin imprints the identity of the pistol on the primer when fired). In Boland v. Bonta, Judge Cormac Carney of the Central District of California issued a preliminary injunction against all three requirements. Predictably, the Ninth Circuit stayed the injunction, except for the part applicable to microstamping. Perhaps to moot the microstamping issue for now, the California legislature recently amended the requirement to apply only to semi-automatic pistols manufactured after Jan. 1, 2028.

There has been a major development regarding prohibitions on the sale and carrying of firearms by young adults aged 18 to 20. The issue should be a no-brainer, given that the Second Amendment protects the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms, the Militia Act of 1792 required male citizens aged 18 to 44 to acquire and carry firearms and young adults are eligible for military service. Despite that, Florida law bans the sale of a firearm by a licensed dealer to a person aged 18 to 20.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in NRA v. Bondi, upheld Florida’s law. Contrary to Bruen, it ignored the lack of any such sales restriction at the Founding and relied on a handful of late 19^th-century laws as analogues. This method would be unthinkable as applied to any other guarantee in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Just hours after the Bondi decision was announced, a judge withheld issuance of the mandate in the case (a procedure that would have made the decision final), and later a majority on the court voted to vacate the panel decision and rehear the case en banc.

Just after the panel decision in Bondi, the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, in Worth v. Harrington, held that young adults aged 18 to 20 are protected by the Second Amendment in obtaining permits to carry handguns. The state has appealed that decision to the Eighth Circuit.

Turning to the subject of the right to carry handguns regardless of age, Bruen invalidated New York’s law that issued permits to a favored few and held that law-abiding citizens generally are entitled to carry without showing a special “need.” Seeking to nullify that decision, New York enacted laws banning permit holders from carrying a firearm in most public places, including public transit, churches and synagogues and public parks. To carry a gun into a business open to the public, a sign must be posted inviting gun owners; otherwise, carrying there is a felony. That turns upside-down the normal rule requiring a “no-trespassing” sign to exclude persons for whatever reasons.

In Antonyuk v. Hochul and in His Tabernacle Family Church v. Nigrelli, and other cases, district courts held the New York ban likely to violate the Second Amendment and issued preliminary injunctions against its enforcement. The Second Circuit court of appeals summarily stayed the injunctions without explanation. While the Supreme Court denied a motion to vacate the stay in Antonyuk, Justice Alito admonished the Second Circuit to expedite the appeal.

The Second Circuit held oral argument in the cases on March 30, 2023. And since then? Again, crickets. Despite the hundreds of pages of legal history set forth in the district court opinions, and the existence of a fundamental constitutional right at stake, the court of appeals has remained silent.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been attempting to foist new, far-reaching regulations upon American gun owners. In violation of the separation-of-powers under which Congress makes the law and the executive branch enforces the law, the ATF purports to expand its reach on its own.

The first regulation seeks to expand the definitions of “firearm” and “frame or receiver” in the Gun Control Act (GCA) to include partially machined raw material that the GCA doesn’t restrict. In VanDerStok v. Garland, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas vacated the entire set of regulations, the Fifth Circuit substantially approved, but the Supreme Court allowed the regulation to go into effect for now. After that, the district court issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the regulations against the plaintiffs in the case.

While VanDerStok focuses on the attempt by the ATF to exceed its authority under the GCA, Second Amendment rights are implicated by the attempt of bureaucrats to restrict the right to keep and bear arms in a manner not condoned by Congress, much less by the text and history of the Second Amendment.

In the second ATF regulation change, after years of classifying pistols with stabilizing braces as pistols, the ATF promulgated a regulation classifying them instead as short-barreled rifles under the National Firearms Act. In Mock v. Garland, the Fifth Circuit held that the rule is likely invalid and temporarily enjoined its enforcement. Concurring, Judge Don R. Willett wrote, “Rearward attachments, besides making a pistol less concealable, improve a pistol’s stability, and thus a user’s accuracy. Accuracy, in turn, promotes safety.”

Back in the district court, Judge Reed O’Connor enjoined enforcement of the pistol-brace rule as applied to the plaintiffs, their customers and members of the association that is party to the suit. Besides violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the regulations were found to violate the Second Amendment. Pistols with braces number as many as seven million and are “in common use,” which Heller held to be one aspect of the test. The Second Amendment protects “making common, safety-improving modifications to otherwise lawfully bearable arms,” as well as “the right of personal gunsmithing.”

The third change involves the ATF proposing new regulations seeking to expand the definition of “engaged in the business of dealing in firearms” in a way that would require untold numbers of ordinary gun owners to get dealer licenses. In the GCA, Congress defined the term to require “dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit,” excluding occasional sales. The ATF has now made up a list of actions that create a presumption that one is engaged in the business, such as “rents … temporary physical space to display … firearms they offer for sale, including … a table or space at a gun show.”

So while the Biden administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy seeks to drive actual dealers out of business—guns are too available, you know—the proposed regulation seeks to make as many as possible get dealer licenses. The motive is clear: “universal background checks” couldn’t get through Congress, so they want to force people who aren’t actually dealers to get licenses and do checks anyway. To exercise the right to buy and sell a gun occasionally, you’ll have to get a license, keep records and be subject to inspection by the ATF. That cannot be consistent with the Second Amendment, and litigation will definitely break out once final regulations are adopted.

If you think that the American media’s relentless attacks on the right to keep and bear arms represent a credible threat to the Second Amendment now, just wait until they come to realize that, instead of merely proselytizing against your rights, they can turn your support for them into a “thought crime.”

Over the last few years, politicians from a handful of states have gotten into the bad habit of teaming up with the media, academia, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and key parts of corporate America, and of using the remarkable power of their alliance to contrive and promulgate political narratives that, even a few weeks earlier, had been on virtually nobody’s radar. In 2017, this team brought us the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax, which started as a salacious and unsubstantiated rumor but quickly became all Washington, D.C., was interested in talking about. That fake narrative was broadcast during every news program; it was conveyed during a lot of professional sports telecasts; it was featured in corporate press releases; it was appended to the splash pages and login forms of widely used websites; it was woven into the algorithms of streaming services and search engines and online stores. Its scope, in short, was astonishing.

This could also happen with guns and our Second Amendment rights. And when such an orchestrated effort comes, they will work overtime to make it just as all-consuming. They’ve already been trying. Every time a mass-murderer attacks—almost always in a so-called “gun-free” zone—the same cabal of media, entertainment personalities and politicians who want to disarm America’s armed citizens try to create a feverish movement to force through gun bans and more.

The only reason this trick has not yet resulted in major new national gun-control legislation is because gun owners have organized themselves. Still, the players necessary for such a push—politicians in anti-Second Amendment states; the White House; many in big tech, academia, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry—are all ready and waiting. They believe that this topic lends itself well to revisionism and mass hysteria. And, because the political will to achieve what its practitioners want to achieve simply does not exist, an end-run around the process is unusually tempting to them.

Practically speaking, this play might take many forms. If they wished to, online behemoths such as Google, Facebook and YouTube could demonetize or bar any user (or bury/misdirect searches) who expressed support for the individual right to bear arms, or even anyone who showed a mere interest in it, on the grounds that such support was “ahistorical” (“misinformation”) or “violent” (“unsafe”). If they decided to, universities and TV stations could reflexively append the word “denier” or “hater” to any figure who opposes gun control, and effectively shut a super-majority of the population out of the national conversation. If they were so inclined, America’s streaming services could refuse to carry any material that contained pro-Second Amendment sentiments, while relentlessly promoting content that called for stricter regulation, or even full prohibition.

Does that sound far-fetched? If so, may I ask why? To my eyes, at least, the last few years have made it abundantly clear that if our elite class wished to go down this road with vigor, it could do so at a moment’s notice. Indeed, if we have learned anything at all from the last decade, it is that the cultural power wielded by a handful of American industries is extremely difficult to resist, and that the tools that those industries use in pursuit of their aims are so flexible that they resemble a blank check. Bluntly put, the truth doesn’t enter into it; what matters is what a handful of potent institutions decide the truth needs to be.

Many big-tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, are already antagonistic to gun ownership, but what if they go a step further?

During the 2020 election, the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop needed to be treated as “misinformation,” so it was—even though it turned out to be entirely true. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, any criticism of the government’s approach needed to be treated as “misinformation,” so they were—even though much of that criticism proved to be correct. In 2017, skepticism toward the wild claim that the president of the United States was a Russian asset needed to be treated as “misinformation,” so it was—even though that skepticism was so obviously accurate as to defy belief.

“Safety,” likewise, has proven endlessly pliable. For years—on college campuses, in major newspapers and on the big-tech platforms—all manner of words and ideas have been labeled as “unsafe,” but then thrown out as soon as it ceased to suit the politics of the administrators. To believe that these protean weapons could not be aimed squarely at the Second Amendment is naïve in the extreme.

We cannot stop the gun-control movement from attempting to make windows into our souls, but we can board up those windows.

In fact, on a smaller scale, the process has already begun. The press already pretends that the Second Amendment is a far-fetched invention of a “right-wing” Supreme Court; it already insists that the Gun Violence Archive is a reliable source; and it already promotes descriptions of how guns work that have absolutely no relation to reality or elementary physics. Online advertisers already punish websites and content-creators who debate or review firearms. Social-media sites, such as Facebook, already have stricter rules governing the discussion and transaction of legal firearms than they do governing illegal drugs. And a handful of states—the ones in which every bad gun-control idea tends to originate—are already pushing to include individuals’ social-media histories in their permit-application processes.

Together, these developments represent a considerable threat to the future of the right to keep and bear arms. The attempt to cast pro-gun voices out of polite society is a straight-up cultural play, the obvious aim of which is to weaken the ability of pro-Second Amendment figures to make their case in the public square. They thereby want to turn America’s hundred-million-plus gun owners into a fringe group that is relegated to the margins of public life.

Despite the many important legal victories that have been won over the last two decades, the renaissance in the right to keep and bear arms has primarily been driven from the ground up—by the people. Alarmed by the prospect that a key part of the U.S. Bill of Rights was on the verge of being read entirely out of the U.S. Constitution, advocates of the Second Amendment did the work: They did research, made arguments, knocked on doors, joined the NRA, voted in elections and called their elected officials until, eventually, they achieved real change at all levels of government. The attempt to remove these voices from the digital space represents nothing more sophisticated than an attempt to reverse this momentum in any way possible, and to send a signal to those on the fence that, if they seek to join in, they will be penalized for it.

The attempt to punish would-be permit-holders for their political views serves as the practical arm of this push. After the Bruen decision was issued in 2022, the State of New York enacted a law that requires all applicants for a concealed-carry permit to furnish “a list of former and current social-media accounts” to state police. According to the architects of the law, the purpose of this provision is to help authorities judge the “character and conduct” of a given applicant. But this, of course, is extraordinarily subjective. Leaving aside the obvious constitutional problems that attach to any system in which applicants are adjudicated on the basis of their particularized characteristics rather than of their compliance with a neutral set of rules, there is simply no way of narrowing down the definitions to the point at which they would rule out abuse.

“Character and conduct” are in the eye of the beholder. Certainly, they cover real threats. But, in the wrong hands, they could also cover religious beliefs, political views, tone of voice and so forth. The key distinction between a right and privilege is that rights are maintained by those citizens whom the government dislikes and privileges are not. Ultimately, the inclusion of private opinions within the permit-review process helps the opponents of the Second Amendment both coming and going: Not only is the state accorded the opportunity to exclude those it disdains from the exercise of their constitutional rights, but those who might want to exercise those rights in the future are incentivized to keep quiet lest their words be arbitrarily used against them. The effect, by design, is to chill the use of this right.

Former California Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson introduced a measure that would have expanded the prohibited list to include those convicted of non- violent misdemeanors—an effort to convict people of pre-crimes.

In California, legislators have pushed for a slightly different approach toward the same end: Instead of attempting to punish thought crimes, as New York has, California has considered experimenting with pre-crime. In 2019, for example, then-Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D) introduced a measure that would have added a new class of non-violent misdemeanors that would have resulted in a 10-year ban on the possession of firearms. Among the misdemeanors were public intoxication, disorderly conduct and driving under the influence. Naturally, one does not need to approve of public intoxication, disorderly conduct or driving under the influence to understand that the logic undergirding this bill is terrifying. In effect, Sen. Jackson was assuming that a person who has demonstrated a willingness to break laws that society considers to be relatively minor will, in the future, demonstrate a willingness to break laws that society considers to be relatively major.

This is not how the law works in a free country. If California wishes to treat public intoxication, disorderly conduct or driving under the influence as felonies, then it ought to treat them as felonies. But it cannot have it both ways—keeping them as misdemeanors in the schedule, except for their effect on the right to keep and bear arms. Vetoing a similar measure the prior year, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said, “I am not persuaded that it is necessary to bar gun ownership on the basis of crimes that are non-felonies, non-violent and do not involve misuse of a firearm.” Indeed, it is not. Unless, of course, the aim isn’t to police crime, but to provide yet another pretext for disarmament.

Second Amendment advocates ought to respond to these threats in two distinct ways. Culturally, we must continue to discredit institutions that have exposed themselves as dishonest actors; meanwhile, we must back alternatives that can pick up the slack where necessary. When organizations such as Facebook and YouTube demonetize or penalize firearms-based content, they are flying in the face of political trends, which have been toward more Second Amendment freedom—and a more diverse gun-owner demographic—not the other way around. If, in a fit of ideological pique, those companies wish to alienate the majority, that is their prerogative. But they can only do so without hurting themselves if there is no ready substitute to which the dispossessed may flock. Those substitutes exist. We must ready them and use them.

On the legal side, we must keep pushing to institute systems that cannot be hijacked by the would-be thought police. Ultimately, subjective judgments are possible only where rights have not been fully guaranteed. Constitutional carry cannot be hijacked, because there is no permitting process to corrupt. “Shall issue” cannot be hijacked in the way that “may issue” can, because it does not allow space for government officials to insert their own opinions. We cannot stop the gun-control movement from attempting to make windows into our souls, but we can board up those windows.

By now, the outlines of the playbook have been made clear. There is no excuse for us to be unprepared if it comes.

Those reading this should seriously consider themselves forewarned!

There was a time in this country when our elected leaders actually cared about protecting the innocent. But today, they don’t. Instead, they misuse and abuse the power of their offices to protect criminals. Because public safety isn’t their goal. Tearing down freedom and disarming you and me is all they care about. In their warped world, criminals are coddled, not punished.

And so violent felons terrorize our communities and prey on the innocent, thanks to a sinister revolving-door “justice” scheme that is purposefully designed to keep them on the streets and out of jail. You can see it everywhere you look!

Far-left political elites—from the President of the United States on down to governors, mayors and radical district attorneys—they fuel a raging fire of violence, murder and crime in our communities. And then those same elites blame you, me, our fellow NRA members and our constitutional freedom for the carnage they create. Their answer to violent crime is to render the innocent helpless against the deadly criminals they enable.

That’s why political hacks in federal agencies pump out propaganda designed to convince more and more Americans that lawful gun ownership, and the fundamental human right to self-defense, is a “public-health problem,” a disease that’s spread by you, me and all patriotic Americans who exercise their God-given right to protect themselves and their loved ones. 

And what do they say is the cure for this make-believe illness? Gun registration. Gun bans. Ammunition bans. Not to mention the outright shaming and vicious persecution of law-abiding gun owners. Think about that. 

Biden and his ilk go out of their way to make excuses for dangerous, violent and murderous criminals and to keep them on the streets. But when it comes to peaceful, hard-working, law-abiding Americans? We’re mocked, slandered and vilified every time Biden finds his way to a microphone.

In all the years of fighting for our God Given and Constitutionally backed rights have we ever witnessed this level of hatred aimed squarely at the principles and values that we hold dear. The same principles and values that made America the freest and most prosperous nation on earth. 

The NRA is one organization holding that line for freedom and advancing it! Right now, 26 states have constitutional-carry laws on the books. They won’t stop fighting until all 50 states recognize what you and I know to be true: Our right to carry a firearm is guaranteed by the Second Amendment, and no law-abiding citizen should have to ask for special government permission from their babysitting governent to defend him or herself or those of their loved ones.

Just last summer, the biggest victory for gun rights in a decade was when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law-abiding Americans have the right to carry firearms for self-defense outside our homes. And more recently, when Joe Biden’s ATF tried to force millions of law-abiding firearm owners to register, alter or surrender their lawfully owned stabilizing pistol braces, they sounded the alarm and are leading the attach charge to stop them.

American freedom, once admired, revered, respected and emulated worldwide—is now under attack from within. Next year’s national election will not decide the future of our freedom for the next four years. It will decide whether our freedom, as we know it, survives at all.

Right now, we have a president who views each and every one of us as his enemy for the simple reason that we protect the fundamental, natural rights found in the Second Amendment–-and he wants to strip those rights away from us. 

Right now, we have a president who said that law-abiding gun owners who own semi-automatic firearms are sick people. And that owning them has no social redeeming value.

Right now, we have a president who wants to reinstate Bill Clinton’s sweeping, crushing gun ban. Right now, we have a president who wants to ban all standard-capacity magazines and force everyone who owns them to either register them with the federal government or turn them in.

Right now, we have a president who wants to roll out a red carpet for trial lawyers to sue American gunmakers out of existence. And right now, the only thing stopping Joe Biden from completely gutting our freedom is a handful of votes in Congress.

From now until Election Day, you’re going to hear from pollsters and so-called experts that this group over here, or that group over there, is the key to this winning this election. One day they’ll say it’s women voters. The next day it’s men. The day after that it’s young voters or retirees, or this religion or that race.

But let me tell you something, and if you take away only one thought, I hope it’s this: If all of us does his or her part today, tomorrow and every day leading up to Nov. 5 next year, we can take back our country and our freedom! We can preserve our Second Amendment rights! We can rekindle a passion for freedom in the hearts of all Americans!

And we can do it all by kicking Joe Biden out of office into pasture and his army of corrupted alphabet agencies to the curb and letting the doors hit ’em in the asses on the way out as well!

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them,” says the English Standard version of The Holy Bible in Ephesians 5:11. The King James version, which I mostly prefer for its poetic language, uses the word “reprove” instead of “expose.” Whatever the closest translation might be, I prefer “expose,” as reproving can be a quiet or loud thing, but exposing is always public.

Both exposing and reproving, of course, can only occur when we know what the works of darkness are. This is no fine point. None of us can completely know what is right and wrong in every moment and situation, as the context and outcomes of human decision-making are complicated—this is why not rushing to judgment is so key to getting or administering actual justice—but most can immediately recognize evil when we see it. And, yes, then we can follow the evil deed back into a person’s motives, intent and actions to find the missed opportunities to see the evil coming so that we might better prevent such a thing in the future.

The recent actions of a mass-murderer in Maine were clearly evil. One reason it is important to say this aloud is that gun-control advocates often refuse to apply the word “evil” to people and choices. Yet they apparently see evil in inanimate objects, beginning with guns.

This, again, is no small point. When these political actors are forced to explain how steel, wood and polymer are guilty of the vilest of crimes, they shift and imply that guns empower the worst in us.

That’s a semantic dodge designed to take the emphasis off the individual who is responsible, but I’ll let that slide for a moment as I agree to the obvious point that guns, as tools designed for self-defense and sport, can be used to do good or evil—or they can just be used to shoot skeet.

Indeed, as any armed citizen can attest, guns empower the vulnerable to live alone; they empower the elderly to retain some cherished independence; and they empower every other good and decent person to potentially protect their families and themselves until help arrives. According to the 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown professor William English, guns are used 1.67 million times per year by Americans to stop threats—and, in most cases, armed citizens do this without firing a shot.

But this dodge of the use of “evil” from gun-control advocates is revealing. And not only because they want all the blame to be on guns as a justification for bans and other gun-control laws, but also because a refusal to delineate these things in terms of good and evil is designed to diminish the individualistic nature of these decisions. Whether someone decides to follow the Golden Rule or whether a person decides, step by step, to follow a path to evil is, however you try to explain it away, a series of individual decisions. Stopping and redirecting a person on the path to evil begins with clearly articulating what is good and what is evil.

Given that they don’t see this critical distinction, it is easier to understand how gun-control advocates can get behind so-called “bail reform” to let caught violent criminals right back onto the streets. And it explains how a “woke,” often George Soros-backed, district attorney can feel justified in declining to prosecute violent offenders.

So, what do we do about those in public office who think there is no evil person, but that guns are nothing more than instruments of evil?

In this democratic republic, we expose them and vote them out.

Faced with mortal danger to their citizens, Israel and Ukraine are restoring the God-given right of self-defense to the people, by removing the roadblocks to lawful arms ownership and carry.

Yet here in the United States—the only nation with the right to arms enshrined in its Constitution and exercised in reality by its citizens—with violent crime soaring in many cities, politicians are trying to further disarm more potential victims. Practically, politically, legally and morally—that’s wrong. And it’s up to us to do our part to stop it.

A common misconception in the West is that the Israeli population is armed to the teeth. Not so. The young men and women carrying rifles on Israeli streets that we often see in media reports—uniformed or not—are actually members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). With few exceptions, serving in the IDF is mandatory for all Israelis.

Israel’s security and intelligence services are rightly considered the foremost in the world. So, Israel’s political leaders likely saw no need for civilians to be routinely armed and thus put many restrictions on owning or carrying a gun. Thus, last October, when Hamas death squads flew in on paragliders and attacked a music festival near Gaza, and then began a campaign of murder, rape and other unspeakable atrocities against Israelis, only about 2% of Israelis legally owned a gun. In other words, 98% of them were effectively defenseless.

For decades, those who oppose the Second Amendment have told us that we don’t need guns for protection. The authorities will protect us, they promised.

In the 1990s, the then-president of NBC News, Michael Gartner, said, “There is no reason for anyone in this country except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use, a handgun.” In 2022, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said that only the police should have guns.

American leaders could learn from their counterparts in Israel and Ukraine.

But the tragedy we saw in Israel shows the mortal danger of that kind of complacency. And you have to ask yourself: If a country with as much military, law enforcement, intelligence and security apparatus as Israel couldn’t protect its people, what country possibly could?

The good news for Israelis is that their government is now lifting some gun restrictions “to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves,” as Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir put it. “I want more weapons on the streets so that the citizens of Israel can defend themselves,” he said last January.

Ukraine authorities did much the same thing in 2022. Faced with Russia’s invading army—along with similar atrocities committed against civilians—in February, the Ukrainian parliament approved a new law allowing citizens the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. “We will give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country,” Ukraine President Zelenskyy said, and the government distributed 25,000 rifles to civilian defenders.

In both countries, armed citizens made a decisive difference. In Ukraine, almost 100 civilians mustered—some armed with hunting rifles—to defend bridges spanning the Mertovod River and forced Russian invaders to retreat. Armed volunteer civilians pushed the Russians out of four other towns, as well.

In Israel, while Hamas attackers executed people in their beds, murdered infants, burned down homes and massacred nearly 200 Israelies in Kfar Aza and Be’eri alone—with at least 1,200 reported overall at the time of this writing—in a third kibbutz called Nir-Am, armed defenders stopped them cold. There, a 25-year-old woman named Inbar Lieberman opened the armory, distributed guns to residents and set up ambushes against the attackers. Together, over a four-hour siege, they killed 25 Hamas terrorists before they could carry out their grisly plans. Thanks to Inbar Lieberman, Nir-Am was the only settlement bordering the Gaza Strip where no Israeli was killed that day.

Americans may not currently need to fight off hostile terrorists, like Israel, or invading armies, like Ukraine, but evil comes in many forms. It could appear at any time—as three gangsters kicking down your door at 3 a.m., as five masked robbers at your local restaurant or as the lone rapist waiting in your parking garage when you leave work to go home.

All that stands between that evil and any one of us is our Big R God Given Constitutionally backed Right and ability to defend ourselves. And the only thing that secures that freedom is our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and so, we must never surrender it—not now; not ever.

You’ve probably heard:  

The Republican governor of Iowa has been under fire for a satanic statue that was slated to stand in the state house for two weeks.  

She said she opposed the statue and urged Christians to pray. But after all, the Satanic Temple had followed the rules in having it installed, so their statue was a form of protected speech.  

Yesterday a former congressional candidate from Mississippi, Michael Cassidy, beheaded and destroyed the statue. He faces a fine and up to a year in prison.  

The past and the future were juxtaposed here. “We oppose X, but the rules say X is all right, so there’s nothing you can do.” That’s the past.  

The future: “Fuck you. We’re taking this thing down.” 

The so-called neutral public square is collapsing.  

It may be just as well, since nobody really believed in it in the first place.   

Appeals to the neutral public square ring hollow these days, because they come from the very people who once pretended they wanted neutrality in things like employment, promotions, education, and everything else under the sun, and once again “neutrality” wound up in practice meaning privilege for their side.  

We’ve got multiple ideologies, incompatible with each other, uneasily coexisting under the same political roof. This is going to be a rough ride.  

There are still Republicans who think they can stick it to their opponents by calling them hypocrites, or noting that they’re inconsistent in banning speech.  

This is silly. The people we’re dealing with are not operating on the basis of general principles like freedom of speech or equality before the law or any of those pretty-sounding phrases.  

They are operating on this basis: we intend to win, and if that means sticking it to our enemies good and hard regardless of any abstract principle, then we’re going to do it.  

What this means for you: you’re living under a hostile regime, and you’re an enemy of the state.  

Here’s a wild idea: how about we try to navigate this bizarre and challenging situation together?  

And here’s another thing:  

They’ll destroy the value of your money and (1) deny it’s happening, then (2) say it’s happening but it’s a sign of a good economy (they actually did this), then (3) admit that it’s bad but blame you for it (they actually did this, too).  

After confining your kids in an ideological prison until age 18, they leave them with absolutely zero knowledge of how to navigate the 21st-century economy, and then shrug their shoulders as they gather statistics about underemployed young people with no prospects living with their parents.  

They got tens of millions to cheer when you got fired for refusing an injection you neither wanted nor needed.  

They’re colonizing your kids’ minds with crazy, anti-human theories.  

Every last thing they get up to is a front in the war against you.  

They want you discouraged and demoralized. They want to make you think nobody agrees with you. They want you to think they’ve won, so you’ll just give up.  

That’s just not us. We don’t give up. We don’t have it in us. We fight, have kids and they deserve a better world. Moreover, we don’t care what people say about us. Anybody who was captain of his high school math team obviously cares about things other than popularity.  

I want to break us the fuck out of all this. I want my community to be successful and secure, so that nothing the regime or its weird economy throws at them can harm them. While other people are arguing on Facebook, I want to combine the knowledge and talents of my community to make us all unbreakable. You don’t have to feel isolated. You don’t have to face the 21st-century economy alone. You don’t have to make your own lonely way under a system that’s throwing everything it has at you. 

We need to stand our ground together and take back our country. 

Be safe, strong and God Bless. 

After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.

Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.

But immediately after October 7—and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces—the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.

Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted anti-Semitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.

Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?

After the George Floyd riots, reparatory admissions—the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population—increased.

Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 precent, despite whites making up 68-70 percent of the general population.

The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.

One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30 percent of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15 percent.

Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged”—and thus considered as fair game on campus.

At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.

Huge numbers of students have entered universities, who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.

Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.

Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading— or all three combined.

The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement.

And, presto, an epidemic of anti-Semitism naturally followed.

In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.

“Gender, black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies  courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors”.  The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and anti-Semitic behavior without consequences.

Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively, and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based-knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.

At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines, and absences.

All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences.

Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.

Exceptions and exemptions are the bible of terrified and careerist administrators.

Faced with an epidemic of anti-Semitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred. But privately they know should the targets of similar hatred be instead blacks, gays, Latinos, or women, then they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.

What is the ultimate result of once elite campuses giving 70-80 percent of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous anti-Semitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?

The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.

They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.

But the erosion is already occurring—and accelerating.

At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.

These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism—and all to be avoided rather than courted.

The government is using the censorship industrial complex to gain control of its own citizens. They are collaborating with private companies and others to suppress thought.

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About 10 years ago, I read a story about someone who posted something on Twitter before leaving for a plane flight. By the time her flight landed in another country, she’d already been “canceled.”

What she wrote was a satirical joke that was easily explained once she landed. However, the damage had already been done. She was fired.

For months after, she couldn’t get a job because the first thing that came up when potential employers Googled her were the news stories about her Twitter gaffe.

She eventually discovered there are companies created solely to suppress and hide information on the internet, such as a negative news story. You could pay money, and a company would create tons of content that would change search results in your favor.

At the time I read it, this was revelatory. That was almost 10 years ago.

Fast forward to today, and not only is this common, but now it has grown into a political machine used for suppressing the thoughts of anyone who disagrees with the approved narrative at the time.

Disagree with lockdowns? Fake social media accounts can be used to downvote you, discredit you, and flag you to social media companies.

Fake accounts can be created to boost content that opposes your idea, so it will never be seen.

In 2020, Americans had their social media posts surveilled, and content flagged with the entire goal of suppressing views that went against the narrative at the time.

The plan was hatched by interns at a federal agency in the national security sector.

Not elected officials. Not actual federal workers. INTERNS. 

They knew that they could “bury” information online. They just took it much, much further.

What once seemed like a sneaky way to change your internet profile now seems horrifyingly Orwellian when it is intentionally used for censorship.

The Worst Case Scenario

Controlling free speech (aka censorship) is one of the fastest ways to gain control.

If people cannot express their thoughts and ideas freely, it begins to seem like everyone thinks the same way.

As a result, this prevents movements from standing up, speaking out, and going against the grain.

Think of popular movements over the last few years: mask protests, lockdown protests, Black and Blue Lives Matter.

If people were not allowed to share their thoughts, none of these movements would have gotten off the ground.

Censorship ultimately becomes a threat to every infrastructure.

We’ve already seen people de-banked for their political views and statements on social media platforms.

It can trickle down to every part of our lives – including what we eat.

Just this week, the UN announced its upcoming recommendation for the West (including America) to “dramatically reduce its meat consumption.”

What if those “in charge” of the internet decide that they agree with the UN and start suppressing any information posted about meat?

Henry Kissinger famously said, “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”

If they control speech, they can control movements.

If they can control movements, they can control critical infrastructure.

If they can control infrastructures, they can control the food.

You may think, “No one is in charge of the internet.” Well, that’s somewhat true…for now.

The UN has created an organization just for this purpose. They just released a document of rules. And it’s terrifying.

The Development of the Internet of Trust

UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

And they just released a plan to combat “misinformation” by creating what it calls the “Internet of Trust.”

The main goal straight from the source is: “Safeguarding freedom of expression and access to information through a multi-stakeholder approach.”

Here is what it says on the first page:

“Safeguarding freedom of expression and the right to information while dealing with dis- and misinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories requires a multi-stakeholder approach. This is the reason why UNESCO, the leading UN agency for the promotion and protection of freedom of expression and to information, is launching Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms. […] Cultivating an Internet of Trust is a shared responsibility among all stakeholders. It calls upon us all to sustain an enabling environment for freedom of expression and the right to information.”

You can read the entire document here.

The key here is that a group of people (not even elected officials) want to create guidelines for what you can say or post on the internet.

If they deem it is misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, or a conspiracy theory, you are in trouble.

If these rules become laws, you will be punished.

If these worldwide rules supersede national laws, you cannot use your “Freedom of Speech” to fight any trouble you get in for sharing your opinion.

The UN/UNESCO wants to create an internet that only allows users to see what they want you to see or what they deem as truth.

But we’ve all seen in the past few years just how MANY times the “truth” changes…

Related Read: Now Is the Time to Find Alternative Communication Channels

The Creation of the Censorship Industrial Complex

The term, Censorship Industrial Complex, is a play on the “military-industrial complex.”

With the military-industrial complex, the military, private companies, and academia work together to help the US win on the battlefield.

In this case, it’s the government (with the help of big business and academia) using censorship of its own citizens to dominate.

Pete McGinnis explains it perfectly when he writes, “But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives.”

What’s worse is that our government knows and participates.

In the Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 9, 2023, Shellenberger spoke about the Censorship Industrial Complex. He said:

“Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.

“The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues.”

What We’ve Learned Since

Since Michael Shellenberger’s explosive testimony in March, another whistleblower has come forward with even more documents showing government involvement in censorship on social media platforms.

As of publication, word came out that it was discovered the US and the UK military made plans for global censorship in 2018.

Again, global internet censorship.

Exactly like what the UN just created a list of guidelines for.

Shellenberger reports that one document “explains that while such activities overseas are ‘typically’ done by ‘the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense,’ censorship efforts ‘against Americans’ have to be done using private partners because the government doesn’t have the ‘legal authority.’”

Terrifying.

The CTIL (Cyber Threat Intelligence League) developed a strategy for censoring online.

Shellenberger reports, “In the spring of 2020, CTIL began tracking and reporting disfavored content on social media, such as  anti-lockdown narratives like ‘all jobs are essential,’ ‘we won’t stay home,’ and ‘open America now.’ CTIL created a law enforcement channel for reporting content as part of these efforts. The organization also researched individuals posting anti-lockdown hashtags like #freeCA and kept a spreadsheet with details from their Twitter bios. CTIL’s approach to ‘disinformation’ went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups.”

How This Affects You and Me

It’s only a matter of time before people start seeking out alternative communication channels.

Not because they want to, but because they might be de-banked, discredited, or put in prison.

Censorship is a powerful weapon that can be used to control our actions and movements.

Stay aware and stay frosty friends.

In liberty,

When Disney CEO Bob Iger sat down to talk with employees about his bumpy year at the helm Tuesday, he said, “I knew there were myriad challenges that I would face.” What he didn’t count on was those “myriad challenges” being millions of still-angry Americans. After management ran the brand into the ground over a popular parental rights’ law last year, nothing seems to be rehabilitating the company’s image. Even the second coming of Iger, who was behind the wheel for some of Disney’s best chapters, hasn’t brought back the magic for consumers. Now, staring down a holiday season with crashing stocks, box office losers, and even less goodwill, will Iger stop riding this polarized express?

Experts have their doubts. Stephen Soukup, who’s spent years analyzing Disney’s radical evolution, worries that as long as Iger is in charge, the right lessons won’t be learned. Still, the author of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital” was encouraged by last week’s news that Disney was at least admitting that it was on the wrong side of public opinion when it comes to their extreme LGBT advocacy. 

In its annual report to the Security and Exchange Commission, management conceded that they “face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses.” 

“What they’re saying,” Soukup translated, “is that their values differed from what the values of their expected audience are — and that’s a big deal,” he underscored on “Washington Watch.” “For a long time, Disney has professed to be the arbiter of values. And it turns out that the American public said, ‘No thanks. We’re not interested in allowing you to tell us what we should or should not believe. We’re not interested in having you inculcate our children in what they should believe, and we’re not going to spend our hard-earned money rewarding you for trying to do so.’”

But is that enough to force them back to neutrality on an agenda that includes, among other shockers, the open “queering” of children? “It should be,” Soukup agreed. “I think Disney faces a couple of very serious problems in trying to recover from this ‘misalignment,’” he explained. “The first of these is the fact that it’s in the business of selling values. You know, storytellers from Aesop to Jesus to the Grimm Brothers all the way forward, have been in the business of using storytelling to transmit values and virtues from one generation to the next, and that’s the business that Disney [is] in. If its values and virtues do not align with the public, then it becomes a serious problem. It’s not as if they can simply say, ‘You know what? … We’re going to take politics and social policy out of our films. We’re no longer going to tell stories that have values.’ I mean, that’s the business they’re in. They have to tell stories that have morals. They tell stories that are intended to transmit values from one generation to the next. And that makes it very difficult.”

The second problem, Soukup insisted, is the guy at the top of the food chain: Iger himself. The two-time CEO, who was behind the wheel of Disney’s woke transformation from 2005 on, is the author of a lot of the extremist tendencies that got his company in hot water in the first place. And while there were some who thought Iger would find a way to rein in Disney’s activism, the last 12 months have given them zero reason for hope. “Disney is a political organization because of Bob Iger,” Soukup insisted. 

“This didn’t start this year. It didn’t start in Florida. It didn’t start with Governor Ron DeSantis. As can be noted, ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,’ Bob Iger has been fighting a political battle, particularly against conservatives, for at least the last decade. He’s fought the battle in North Carolina. He’s fought the battle in Georgia. He’s fought the battle in Florida. This is something that he believes firmly in. And the fight against Governor DeSantis in Florida that made so much news over the last several months was, in fact, Bob Iger’s doing.”

“If you look at what Disney has said about when it decided to get involved,” the vice president of the Political Forum continued, “it was when Bob Iger emailed the then-current leadership and said, ‘We have to do something about this law in Florida. We can’t sit idly by and allow this to happen.’ And what Disney decided to do was fire [CEO] Bob Chapek and bring back Bob Iger. So I think Disney has two serious problems. Their business model is one of selling values. And the man who runs the company is an aggressively and overtly political player.”

And it’s not just Disney who’s thumbing their nose at shareholders. Target, Bud Light, Starbucks, Nike, and a slew of other companies made a very intentional calculation to prioritize politics over profits. “In order for any of these businesses that have been punished by the public over the last year for being political, in order for any of them to make any headway in winning back their customers, they first have to get it,” Soukup emphasized. “It’s become clear, for example, that Target does not get it. That Target does not understand why its customers left it behind, why its customers got upset, why its customers started to boycott, and that they’re doubling down on the tactics that in fact alienated [people].” 

While Target CEO Brian Cornell talks a good game, telling investors, “We are firmly focused on getting back to growth,” shelves of rainbow Santas and the hire of a senior-level Pride Lead say otherwise. “It was bad enough when they decided to politicize and sexualize the month of June,” Soukup said, “… but now they’re doing very much the same to Christmas. Their Christmas displays are reportedly very aggressively sexualized and very aggressively politicized. And that is a demonstration of the fact that the management of Target doesn’t understand or is unwilling to accept the verdict delivered to it by the public.” Until they do, they’re “courting the wrath of both customers and shareholders,” he insisted. 

Maybe these Fortune 500 companies thought this wave of consumer activism rocking the country was a fad, that it would just blow over, and we’d all return to business as usual. But, as the latest quarterly reports for Target, Disney, and Bud Light prove, Americans’ outrage has staying power. At a time when retail sales are up, these trans-embracing giants are underwater. 

“I think the public is exhausted with politics being everywhere and in everything. It’s not that Target is left-wing. It’s not that Bud Light embraced left-wing values. It’s not that Disney is liberal. They are,” Soukup said. “… But that’s not the point. The point is that people are tired of having politics shoved down their throat at every possible occasion. They’re just exhausted with the whole thing, and it’s not something that’s going to go away as long as they keep doing this. This is something that the public is going to react to negatively.”

And while these businesses can survive a good bit of public pressure, “The question is, how long does management survive?” Soukup asked. “How long do the boards and the shareholders agree to keep Bob Iger on, for example, if he doesn’t get it — if he continues to pursue the agenda that got Disney into trouble in the first place? … He may have built Disney into a giant entertainment company, and he may be the nicest man in entertainment, as everybody says. But … eventually, the Disney board and Disney shareholders are going to get tired of what he’s doing and his inability to recognize that he’s a big part of the problem.” 

For now, the biggest takeaway is that Americans are finally sending a message companies can’t ignore. Sure, some CEOs will stubbornly carry on, willing to kamikaze their brands for radical causes, but there are plenty of rational executives who see the writing on the wall.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the general zeitgeist in American business is to depoliticize as much as possible at this point,” Soukup pointed out. “Sometimes that’s going to be very difficult, given positions that have been taken just in the last three, four, five years. But I think that a great many executives and managers have seen just how potent customer reaction can be.” And that’s a significant change from decades past. 

“It used to be the case that nobody feared conservative consumers very much because conservative boycotts always failed. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think that even though these are not organized boycotts, they have been very effective — and they have certainly sent a message to the companies that have been affected and to others who might go down that same road. … To use The Godfather analogy, these guys are Luca Brasi [sleeping] with the fishes. They’re the warning to the rest of business that if you push this too far, you will end up the same way. So I think that what we’re starting to see among a great many corporate leaders is a desire simply to get out of the politics business.”

Whether Disney ever wakes up and joins them is anyone’s guess. Until then, Soukup advises, make the most of this Christmas season: “Vote with your dollars and invest with your dollars.”

Lightyear? A flop. Strange World? A flop. The Little Mermaid? A flop. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? A flop. The Marvels? A flop. Snow White? Postponed, probably for fear of a flop.

All told, Disney has lost nearly $1 billion at the box office due to films like these bombing, according to box office analyst Valient Renegade.

What went wrong with these films? The common thread linking them all is a determined and ever-more-obvious woke agenda that is poisoning their storylines. Lightyear—an animated children’s film, for goodness’ sake—features a homosexual kissing scene. Strange World includes a teen gay romance. The Little Mermaid stars an African American Ariel, seemingly just in order to check a diversity box. The Marvels contains only incompetent men so that masculine women can show off. According to lead actress Rachel Zegler, Disney’s new live action Snow White will have a “modern edge,” and the titular character “is not gonna be saved by the prince.”

But Disney’s choice to double down on the political fads of the day, turning art and entertainment into propaganda, seems to be hurting their bottom line. The public seems to be rebelling against their scheduled indoctrination sessions at the theater. Will that be enough to cause a course correction, especially when Disney sees the success of recent films that specifically avoid including LGBTQ+, feminist, and race-related agendas? It’s hard to say.

If anything could bring studio executives to their senses, it would be the sensation of sinking lower in their plush leather chairs as their wallets slowly collapse. The Hollywood Reporter just ran an article titled “Marvel Studios Taking Stock of Strategy Amid ‘The Marvels’ Meltdown,” which suggests that Disney (the owner of Marvel) may consider a new direction, although the article hints that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s problem is cranking out too many spin-off TV shows, not its political agenda. The article relates that Marvel and Disney are scaling back the number of superhero movies in 2024 from three to one. Marvel seems poised to reduce its output and focus on quality over quantity. But will that “quality” include a return to good, old-fashioned storytelling? Or will it mean just glitzier, better-written versions of the propaganda they’ve been churning out in recent years?

One problem with designing stories to fit a preconceived political mold is that, almost by definition, it works against those factors that make a story appealing. Stories touch us when they tap into the universal human experience, communicating something fundamental about what it means to be alive, the joys and sorrows, tragedies and triumphs common to us all. Stories are inspiring when they show us heroism, self-sacrifice, love—in forms that all of us, regardless of race or sexual orientation, can relate to. The best ones open our eyes to the mystery and wonder of the universe and the fragile beauty of human life. They take us out of ourselves and our limited “identity”—in the sense that progressives use the term.

Wokeism, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that no human experience is truly universal. Rather, one’s experience of life is fundamentally different if one is black or homosexual or female or part of any other subgroup one cares to mention. For this reason, we need greater “representation” of these types of people on screen, because a black or female or homosexual audience member can’t relate to all these “straight white males.” Because political correctness focuses obsessively on identity and separating people into categories, it misses (or intentionally obscures) what is common in human nature. Of course, it’s going to be less appealing to people generally when it sets out to appeal only to subcategories of the population. Wokeism divides, whereas truly great stories unite.

Part of the irony here is how shallow our fashionable vision of diversity really is, for it can only understand identities based on mere externals or accidental qualities, such as skin color or gender, as though those things were the most important, most fundamental aspect of a person. In reality, there are many other and much more profound forms of identity. For instance, though I am one of those dreaded “straight white males,” I can relate much better to a black woman who shares my religious views than I can to another white male who has different beliefs. What one believes and values is a much deeper, more important form of identity.

That being said, I feel no need to play the identity game anyway, even at this deeper level I am pointing to. That’s because I believe in the stability and universality of human nature, which ought to be at the heart of storytelling. Stories ought to explore timeless and universal truths by accessing those parts of human life that don’t change with time or place: love, courage, heroism, family, death, birth, the search for meaning, and so forth. I reject the principle that every perspective is altogether historically and culturally situated, and therefore necessarily dispossesses people of other times or cultures. It is an extremely narrow-minded view of humanity, destined only to further polarize people.

In the end, our most recent iteration of the “progressive” agenda is incompatible with true art. I am therefore not surprised by Disney’s travails. Either the art will die, or the agenda will die. Eventually, either Disney will fail, or they will start telling stories about the good, the true, and the beautiful, a triad once known as the transcendentals, because they transcend this sublunary realm of change and all of its petty politics that pass away as swiftly as the autumn leaves.

Propaganda is temporary. Great art is timeless.