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Exposing the Garland Memo: A Case Study in Government Weaponized Against Parents


On October 4, 2021, the Attorney General of the United States issued a directive that would rattle the very foundation of American civil society. Parents, concerned about their children’s education, found themselves recast not as civic participants but as potential threats to national security. According to a memo issued by AG Merrick Garland, the Justice Department would coordinate with the FBI and US Attorneys to address a supposed spike in threats against school board officials. But the underlying claim was a fiction. And now, thanks to newly released internal DOJ documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL), we can say conclusively what many suspected at the time: the Biden administration orchestrated this memo as part of a political operation, driven not by law or evidence, but by ideology and electoral calculus.

Let us begin with a question. Why did the Department of Justice, whose jurisdiction is meant to guard against actual federal crimes, insert itself into a public conversation dominated by non-criminal speech? The answer, as the documents now confirm, is that it did so at the prompting of the White House, which viewed parents not as constituents to be heard, but as dissidents to be managed.

The initial spark came from a September 29, 2021 letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden. In this letter, the NSBA urged the administration to treat protests at school board meetings as akin to “domestic terrorism,” citing the Patriot Act as a model for possible federal intervention. The invocation of such a statute was absurd on its face. Protesting mask mandates or objecting to Critical Race Theory, however forcefully, does not rise to the level of terrorism. But what is more damning is what followed: a flurry of communications within the DOJ, indicating that officials were under pressure to respond.

On October 1, just two days after the NSBA letter, Tamarra Matthews-Johnson of the Attorney General’s office flagged the matter for Kevin Chambers at the Deputy Attorney General’s office, stating that the White House “has been in touch” about how DOJ might assist. At 8:17 a.m. the next morning, Sparkle Sooknanan, then of the Associate Attorney General’s office and now a federal judge, demanded an urgent review from the Civil Rights Division: were there any statutes, any authorities, that could justify a DOJ response? The request was extraordinary. It was a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. They had the political goal, and now needed a legal rationale to support it.

What followed was a quiet rebellion from within. Career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, legal professionals whose job is to interpret law rather than bend it, pushed back. One stated explicitly that the behavior cited by NSBA “likely fall[s] outside of our jurisdiction.” Another said, unequivocally, “there is nothing specific” that could be applied. The attempt to find federal jurisdiction was, in the understated phrasing of another DOJ attorney, “ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct.”

In other words, the law said no. But politics said yes. So politics won.

By the morning of October 4, a draft memo was already circulating. Language referring to election interference was quietly stripped out, after concerns that it would appear overtly partisan. But the core premise of the memo, that DOJ would mobilize against parents based on a manufactured crisis, remained untouched. The final version went out that day to the FBI, US Attorneys, and law enforcement nationwide.

To understand the magnitude of this decision, one must consider the federal apparatus being invoked. We are not speaking of a local school district or even a state attorney general’s office. We are speaking of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Security Division. These are the institutions tasked with defending the United States from foreign threats, organized crime, and acts of terrorism. Now they were being mobilized against citizens speaking at school board meetings.

Some defenders of the memo have insisted that it was a neutral effort to ensure safety. But the internal documents tell a different story. Not only did the DOJ lack jurisdiction, but it also lacked data. One Civil Rights attorney reviewed the NSBA’s own sources and concluded that “the vast, vast majority of behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law” and that most of it “is protected by the First Amendment.”

At this point, any good faith rationale should have evaporated. The legal authority did not exist. The facts did not support intervention. And the lawyers responsible for enforcing civil rights said as much. But Garland’s DOJ, driven by political appointees, forged ahead.

Why? To chill dissent. To create a pretext for federal monitoring. And, most damningly, to tilt the political field in favor of Democrats ahead of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.

The timing is revealing. At the very moment when education was emerging as a major campaign issue in Virginia, the Biden administration intervened with a chilling federal directive aimed squarely at the parents who were driving that conversation. The effect, if not the intent, was to intimidate them into silence.

This was not merely a bureaucratic misstep. It was, as AFL President Gene Hamilton put it, an effort “to deprive parents of two fundamental rights—the right to speak, and the right to direct the upbringing of their children.” And it was done under color of law, through an administration that promised to restore norms while quietly undermining them.

What is perhaps most distressing is the downstream effect. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, blindsided by the memo, was left scrambling to define what exactly it was being asked to do. Internal messages reveal confusion and concern, not just about the lack of legal basis, but about the very premise. Was this really what the federal government was now for?

A free society depends on more than the formal guarantees of its Constitution. It depends on the restraint of those in power. It depends on a culture of governance that distinguishes between disagreement and danger, between protest and threat. When that distinction is lost, freedom becomes a mere parchment barrier.

The Garland memo was not an isolated event. It was a signal. It told Americans that certain views, particularly those out of step with the educational elite, would not be tolerated without consequence. It told career DOJ attorneys that their legal advice could be overruled by political expedience. And it told the White House that federal power could be used to police ideology under the guise of law enforcement.

We must reject this approach categorically. Not because we are indifferent to the safety of public officials, but because we know that civil liberties are not things to be managed or balanced, but principles to be upheld. The right to speak at a school board meeting, however impassioned, is not a loophole in national security law. It is the beating heart of American self-government.

The documents released by AFL do more than expose a scandal. They illustrate the dangers of weaponized bureaucracy. They reveal a Justice Department more interested in political theater than legal fidelity. And they confirm, beyond dispute, that the October 4 memo was not about law enforcement. It was about silencing dissent.

In his inaugural address, President Biden claimed he would “restore the soul of America.” But there is nothing soulful about suppressing speech, circumventing legal advice, and intimidating parents for participating in democracy. That is not restoration. It is repression, dressed in bureaucratic prose.

The Biden administration must be held accountable for its actions. Congress should investigate not merely the memo itself, but the full extent of White House involvement, the decision-making process within DOJ, and the broader pattern of targeting political dissent. And the American people must remain vigilant, lest today’s memo become tomorrow’s precedent.

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The Quiet Jihad: Islamist Infiltration Became Academic Orthodoxy In America


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

In 1991, Mohamed Akram, a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, drafted what seemed to many at the time an arcane internal strategy document. Titled An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America, the memorandum was not a prediction, nor a mere expression of hopes, but a plan. Its words were plain and precise: to undertake a “civilizational jihad” aimed at eliminating Western civilization from within. In short, a campaign to reshape the United States in accordance with Islamist ideals, not through bombs or bullets, but through institutions, coalitions, and long-term ideological subversion.

The document was discovered in 2004 during an FBI raid on the home of Ismail Elbarasse, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian Committee and a former board member of the Holy Land Foundation. That foundation was later convicted of funneling millions to Hamas. The memorandum, entered as evidence in the largest terrorism financing trial in US history, should have been a siren. Instead, it was filed away, dismissed by many commentators as the paranoid blueprint of an overzealous ideologue. They were wrong.

Some may object: conspiracies are a dime a dozen. Anyone can draft a document. But what makes this memorandum exceptional is not only its clarity and specificity, but its remarkable congruence with developments in American civic life over the past three decades. Akram named names. He listed organizations, most still active today, and gave precise instructions on how to steer American political and cultural institutions toward the Brotherhood’s ends. This was not a fantasy. It was a plan of operation. And now, more than thirty years later, the United States is living through its implementation.

Let us begin with the objective itself. The memorandum spells it out without euphemism: “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.” This was not a call to dialogue. It was not a call to integrate. It was a declaration of ideological conquest. But unlike the brutal immediacy of al-Qaeda or ISIS, the Brotherhood’s vision is subtle. Their preferred weapons are not explosives, but ideas. Their preferred terrain is not the battlefield, but the university, the courtroom, and the NGO boardroom.

The most consequential battlefield has proven to be academia. A generation of scholars, grants, endowments, and academic chairs have seeded American universities with ideas sympathetic to Islamist critiques of the West. The clearest example is Dr. Jonathan Brown a convert to Islam and the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University. In June 2025, Dr. Brown made headlines for suggesting, on X, that Iran should launch a symbolic missile strike on a US military base. He framed this not as fantasy but as strategic balance. Even more astonishingly, Brown retains a position training American diplomats.

This is not guilt by association. It is a pattern. Dr. Brown has praised Islamist movements and has been linked, both ideologically and institutionally, to the Brotherhood. His father, also a convert to Islam, was deported from the US in 2015 for supporting terrorist causes. That alone would merit scrutiny. But the larger context reveals more: Brown is not an outlier. He is emblematic of a trend in which Western universities offer sanctuary, prestige, and even state influence to figures deeply aligned with ideological opponents of the American regime.

Why is this allowed? The answer is both structural and ideological. Structurally, the Brotherhood has worked for decades to legitimize itself through front organizations. CAIR, ISNA, MSA, and NAIT, all named in the memorandum, have entrenched themselves within civic life. They have leveraged the language of civil rights, cultural pluralism, and social justice to deflect scrutiny. But this is not the pluralism of the American Founders. It is a calculated mimicry, a rhetorical Trojan horse. CAIR, in particular, has grown powerful enough to influence corporate training sessions, FBI outreach, and even school curricula. The same group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing case now advises American institutions on Islamophobia.

The ideological fuel for this strategy is the concept of “soft jihad.” The Brotherhood’s genius was recognizing that ideological capture could be more enduring than terrorism. To borrow from Antonio Gramsci, cultural hegemony precedes political revolution. The Brotherhood has pursued its hegemony not by overt domination but by normalizing its worldview. Consider the linguistic sleight-of-hand: criticism of Islamist ideology is branded as racism. Security concerns are dismissed as Islamophobia. Calls for assimilation are recast as xenophobia. The cumulative effect is not merely the silencing of dissent, but the transformation of public morality. It is not merely that Americans are being told not to criticize radical Islam. They are being trained to believe that doing so is immoral.

Take the campus protests in 2024 and 2025. Demonstrations ostensibly in support of Palestinian rights quickly metastasized into calls for the abolition of Israel, attacks on Western values, and explicit praise for Hamas. At Columbia, UCLA, and Harvard, protesters chanted slogans directly lifted from Brotherhood propaganda. The phrase “From the river to the sea” is not a geographic aspiration. It is a genocidal demand. It aligns precisely with Hamas’s stated goal: the eradication of the Jewish state. Yet these protests were often protected, even praised, by university administrators. In some cases, professors joined the chants. In others, students who dissented were harassed or disciplined.

Again, the question is: how did this happen? The answer is that the Brotherhood never aimed to win by numbers. It aimed to win by leverage. Infiltrating a university’s DEI board (regardless of what they’re calling it today) is more strategic than converting a neighborhood. Capturing a seminary is more effective than radicalizing a mosque. Influence within media and academia shapes future diplomats, journalists, and lawmakers. Consider again Dr. Jonathan Brown, who holds a prestigious post at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, the institution tasked with training America’s next generation of diplomats. He is not merely offering courses in comparative religion or Islamic history. He is shaping worldviews, teaching the values and ideological frameworks that mirror those advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood. Over time, this kind of influence bends not just the institutions but the nation’s moral compass.

Some might say this is mere moral panic. They will ask for proof. But the proof is the very document itself, affirmed by the Department of Justice, entered into evidence in federal court, and consistent in substance with the outcomes we now witness. The memorandum was not only a statement of intent. It was an instruction manual. And like a well-executed recipe, it has produced its intended result.

What is needed now is not hysteria, but clarity. Clarity that Islamist ideology is not identical to Islam, that freedom of religion is not a license for subversion, and that tolerance cannot be the suicide pact of a civilization. The United States has every right, and indeed a duty, to guard its institutions from ideological capture. That does not mean banning belief. It means understanding belief systems that explicitly reject the Constitution, that see liberty as vice and pluralism as sin, cannot be treated as neutral participants in the civic order. They are not here to join the republic. They are here to replace it.

Akram and his colleagues were honest about their intentions. That is more than can be said for their apologists in the West. To them, the memorandum is either fiction or an irrelevant historical artifact. But the architects of civilization must contend with realities, not hopes. The Brotherhood’s strategy was not shouted from a pulpit. It was whispered in boardrooms, university seminars, and foundation grant meetings. It is slow. It is patient. But it is effective.

The question is whether Americans, and particularly their leaders, will have the courage to name the problem. The stakes are not abstract. They are institutional integrity, national security, and civilizational continuity. For the Brotherhood, victory does not require tanks. It requires silence. It requires our unwillingness to speak plainly, to draw lines, to identify hostile ideologies as such.

And so we return to the memorandum. It warned us. It showed its hand. And now it is executing its strategy, step by step, as outlined over thirty years ago. Those who choose to ignore this do not merely risk being proven wrong. They risk surrendering a civilization in slow motion.

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Epstein And The Intelligence Trap: What They Know And Can’t Say


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

The Dissonance of Silence

It is often said that silence speaks louder than words. But in politics, particularly in the realm of national security and institutional deception, silence can scream. This week, the Department of Justice issued a two-page memo attempting to close the book on the Epstein affair. It claimed, with bureaucratic finality, that there is no client list, no credible blackmail operation, and no intelligence connection to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, three people who once led the charge against deep state duplicity, who built their reputations torching the intelligence community’s darkest corners, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino, stood by and said, essentially, nothing.

DOJ/FBI Memo Regarding Jeffrey Epstein

This abrupt and telling quiet should give us pause.

To understand the full weight of their silence, we must revisit who these individuals are and the stakes of what they now decline to confront. Bondi, the former Florida Attorney General, earned acclaim for prosecuting high-profile criminals and exposing systemic corruption. Patel, an architect of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Russia hoax, is one of the most legally precise and fearless national security officials of the past decade. Bongino, who served in the Secret Service and later as a conservative commentator, has made a career of unmasking the inconsistencies of the intelligence apparatus, none more frequently than Epstein.

In January 2024, Bongino played a clip on his podcast in which a journalist stated he was “100% convinced that Epstein was killed because he made his whole living blackmailing people.” Bongino added, “I’ve heard the same claims from another reporter and they are super important.” Patel has similarly echoed doubts about Epstein’s death and the intelligence community’s role in covering up his network. Bondi, during the election cycle and beyond, pledged that the Epstein saga was not over. Each built public trust on the promise that they would get to the bottom of it.

Now, they all plead ignorance. Or worse, they call for no further action.

When asked at a cabinet meeting whether Epstein was connected to US intelligence, Bondi responded she didn’t know and would “look into it.” Bongino has fallen silent on the topic he once described as the tip of an intelligence iceberg. Patel, in statements since assuming office, has offered little to nothing on the subject.

Given who these people are, that silence is not neutral. It is epistemically loaded. What explains it?

There are two plausible answers. First, they now know, beyond the veil of classification, that Epstein was in fact an asset of the US intelligence community. Not a rogue financier, not merely a criminal pervert, but a controlled contractor in a sprawling, state-sanctioned blackmail apparatus designed to secure kompromat on foreign and domestic elites. If this is true, then acknowledging it would expose ongoing operations, compromise alliances with other intelligence services such as MI6 and Mossad, and detonate diplomatic landmines too dangerous to handle.

The second possibility is more sinister. Perhaps they are not simply withholding in service of state interests. Perhaps they, too, are now targets of the very coercive mechanisms they once pledged to dismantle. Perhaps they are being threatened, pressured, blackmailed, directly or indirectly, overtly or subtly. Epstein’s apparatus, after all, was designed to survive him. The very system that protected him for decades still exists. And it is entirely capable of protecting itself.

The CIA is not merely a collector of secrets; it is a curator of silence.

That brings us back to the core of the matter: Epstein was not a lone predator. He was not merely a billionaire with an inexplicable passion for teenage masseuses. His operations were not accidental, nor could they have persisted without protection at the highest levels of intelligence and government.

Consider his early trajectory. In the late 1970s, Epstein was hired at the Dalton School by Donald Barr, an ex-OSS officer and the father of future Attorney General Bill Barr. This is not coincidence. Epstein didn’t even possess a college degree. His placement at an elite school known for educating the children of the Manhattan elite set the stage for everything to come. He gained access to power, and more importantly, to the children of power.

From there, Epstein transitioned into finance with a swift rise at Bear Stearns, where he managed sensitive accounts and was involved in insider trading schemes tied to prominent families. He exited the firm just ahead of an SEC investigation, unscathed, protected. In the 1980s, he partnered with Steven Hoffenberg in a massive Ponzi scheme at Towers Financial. Hoffenberg went to prison. Epstein did not.

In a court filing in 2019, Hoffenberg stated under oath that Epstein was the “architect” of the fraud. The US government never charged him. Again, protected.

In the 1990s, Epstein became deeply enmeshed with Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands and co-founder of the secretive Mega Group. Epstein was given full control of Wexner’s fortune, deeded Wexner’s New York mansion, and placed into direct financial and operational contact with Israeli intelligence. His closest confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, an Israeli asset who helped disseminate surveillance software to foreign governments was clearly put in Epstein’s orbit by MI6.

These are not happenstances. This is recruitment and operational integration.

Epstein moved weapons, money, and people. He brokered deals in the Middle East with known intelligence-linked arms traffickers. He used Southern Air Transport, a CIA shell company from the Iran-Contra era. He obtained a fake passport with a Saudi address. He spent time in intelligence-connected banking hubs like the Cayman Islands and Geneva. He was never arrested for these activities. He was protected, always.

His homes were wired with cameras. His girls were groomed to recruit more. His visitors were famous, influential, and often compromised. He catalogued everything. Digital kompromat for the post-Cold War age. Hundreds of hard drives and thousands of DVDs containing unknown volumes of potentially incriminating material were discovered in his properties, but inexplicably, the FBI left them behind and allowed Epstein’s people to remove them. When the agency later returned to retrieve them, they were gone, only to be returned by Epstein’s own lawyers. By then, who knows what had been copied, edited, erased, or weaponized.

So when the DOJ now asserts, with a straight face, that there is no “credible evidence” of a client list, we must understand what that phrase really means. It means nothing admissible, nothing declassified, nothing that would require official action. It does not mean the list does not exist. It means the regime will not recognize it.

To question this is not to indulge conspiracy. It is to recognize pattern. This is the same DOJ that refused to examine Hunter Biden’s foreign influence operations, the same FBI that sat on the Clinton email server scandal, the same intelligence community that lied about FISA abuse.

And so we must return to the question that animates this article: Why are Bondi, Patel, and Bongino protecting the very institution they once sought to expose?

If it is for national security, then fine. But tell us. Say that. Do not insult our intelligence with implausible denials and bureaucratic dodge. If they are under threat, then say that, too. Even obliquely.

Because the current silence is not just a betrayal of past statements. It is a betrayal of the people they once served. The American public entrusted them with the truth. They are now behaving like agents of the same concealment machine they once sought to dismantle. Don’t forget, I’ve been asking everyone to give them time to do their jobs.

One solution remains: appoint a special prosecutor. Not one tethered to the Justice Department. Not one embedded within the intelligence bureaucracy. An outsider, with full subpoena and prosecutorial power, to uncover the truth and bring justice to Epstein’s victims, to indict the protectors and profiteers of the system, and to restore credibility to institutions that have forfeited it.

Let the chips fall where they may. If the intelligence community finds that threatening, perhaps it should reconsider the wisdom of trafficking in children and kompromat.

The facts are stubborn. Epstein worked with and for intelligence. He was protected to the end. And if Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino will not say it, someone must.

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The Day The Nobel Died: Obama, DEI, And The Collapse Of Merit


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The Nobel Peace Prize once meant something. For most of the 20th century, it functioned as a global marker of moral achievement, an international accolade reserved for those who, through sacrifice and diplomacy, bent history toward peace. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Schweitzer, and the International Red Cross did not receive their laurels because they looked or spoke a certain way, nor because they offered vague gestures toward hope. They earned them by altering the course of conflict and history. The same cannot be said for Barack Obama, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a mere eleven days into his presidency. It is this episode, an award based not on actions but identity, not on accomplishment but anticipation, that marks the definitive DEI conquest of what was once the highest secular moral honor on Earth.

Let us be precise. Obama had done nothing when he received the prize. He had been in office for just over a week. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in its public justification, cited his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” This, of course, refers to no act. It refers to rhetoric, a mood, a spirit, a branding. Even Obama himself admitted, rather sheepishly, that he had not “deserved” it, framing the award as a “call to action.” A call, we might add, for which there was no apparent need until the committee answered it.

Critics, including the Nobel Committee’s own former secretary, Geir Lundestad, later acknowledged the misstep. In his 2015 memoir, Lundestad admitted that the award had not achieved its goal and had instead provoked skepticism, even among Obama’s supporters. A Gallup poll taken shortly after the announcement showed that 61% of Americans believed the award was undeserved. The committee was not honoring peace, it was manufacturing it through the lens of identity and hope, two currencies central to the modern DEI movement. The prize, historically anchored in tangible outcomes, was now drifting in the subjective currents of aspirational politics.

This moment matters not just because it was absurd, but because it marked the end of the Nobel Peace Prize as a serious institution. Having crossed the Rubicon, the committee continued its descent into abstraction, symbolism, and ideological virtue-signaling. In 2012, the prize was given to the European Union, an organization beset by internal economic conflict and external border crises, and hardly a model of peace. The award prompted backlash from former laureates and European citizens alike, many of whom saw it as a nakedly political statement in support of the failing Eurozone experiment.

In 2016, the prize went to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for a peace deal that had just been rejected in a national referendum. In other words, the committee awarded a deal the Colombian people themselves did not want. This is no small irony. The Peace Prize, in this case, was not celebrating peace but defying democracy.

Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia received the prize in 2019 for making peace with Eritrea. But within a year, he was presiding over the brutal Tigray conflict, during which war crimes were alleged on both sides. Ahmed, once a darling of the international community, was now accused of leading one of the worst humanitarian crises of the decade. The Nobel Committee has never revoked a prize.

And why should it? It had already set the precedent in 2009, when it handed the medal to Barack Obama for the crime of being Barack Obama. A man of eloquence, yes, but also a man who presided over 563 drone strikes in non-war zones like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing as many as 807 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. These operations, many of them carried out in secret, stained his presidency with a blood not easily scrubbed by lofty speeches. The expansion of America’s covert war machine under Obama further destabilized regions already on the edge and inflamed anti-American sentiment that persists today. This, too, is part of his legacy.

Consider also that Obama’s signature foreign policy promise, to close Guantanamo Bay, remained unfulfilled. His “reset” with Russia ended in Crimea leading to the current war in Ukraine. His Iran deal destabilized allies in the Middle East and funded proxy wars through Tehran’s terror tentacles. Where, then, was the peace?

Now contrast this with the latest news. On June 21, 2025, Pakistan announced its intent to nominate Donald J. Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The reason? His decisive intervention in a rapidly escalating military conflict between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. The ceasefire, publicly announced by Trump on Truth Social, was achieved after 48 hours of diplomacy led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. It was a real act with measurable consequences. Bloodshed was averted. Stability was restored. This was not the issuance of hope, but the application of leverage and skill.

Now let me be clear: Trump does not need the Nobel Peace Prize. But the prize needs someone like Trump if it hopes to recover a shred of its former dignity. And yet, even if he receives it, it will ring hollow. It will be a medal forged in the fires of politics, warped beyond recognition. The rot began with Obama. The Nobel Committee signaled that race and rhetoric mattered more than outcomes. And the world has noticed.

The deterioration of race relations in the United States under Obama was not a side effect, it was a consequence of his governing philosophy. His administration trafficked in the very kind of identity essentialism that DEI now canonizes. From the beer summit to the Ferguson narrative, Obama chose sides before facts emerged, casting America in a permanently racialized light. His presidency did not heal the racial divide. It institutionalized it. Today, public trust across racial lines is lower than it was in 2008. That is not peace. That is entropy.

So when Pakistan nominates Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, the correct response is not applause, but irony. Of course he deserves it. But what does it mean anymore? When the prize went from honoring MLK’s courage to celebrating a freshman senator with no record, it forfeited its soul. When it chose political theatre over diplomatic substance, it ceased to be a reward for peace and became a prop in the global performance of progress.

If the Nobel Committee wishes to recover its relevance, it must begin again to anchor its awards in results, not ideology. The damage may be irreversible, but clarity demands the admission: Barack Obama did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. He never did. The committee gave it to him not despite the absence of achievement, but because of it. It was a ceremonial coronation of the DEI worldview, where appearance and aspiration eclipse record and result. In so doing, they did not elevate Obama. They buried the prize.

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Tribal Truths And Modern Myths: Why California Is Not ‘Stolen Land’


The slogan is simple, the sentiment sweeping: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” It festoons placards, hashtags, and classroom walls from Sacramento to Santa Cruz. But as with most slogans meant to end debate, this one also seeks to preclude history. It presumes that California was once peaceful, indivisible, and unjustly snatched from its rightful stewards. But history, and a robust respect for indigenous agency, tells a far more complex story, one in which conquest, conflict, diplomacy, and trade all played a part. To claim that the land was “stolen” and never rightfully acquired is not only historically inaccurate, it infantilizes the very indigenous groups it purports to defend.

California, contrary to modern myth, was never a harmonious Eden of united tribes singing songs of peace until the Spanish came ashore. The truth is that for over 12,000 years, more than 500 tribal societies occupied the region, often in brutal competition. These tribes warred incessantly over territory, trade routes, slaves, and honor. The Haida and Tlingit, although northern, share cultural practices that echoed throughout the West: the capture of slaves, the killing of rivals, the assimilation or extermination of the weak. Entire tribes were wiped from existence. Lands changed hands not once but dozens of times, often through bloodshed.

By the time Spanish missionaries arrived in the late 1700s, the number of distinct tribes had already plummeted. Epidemic disease, internecine warfare, and resource exhaustion had reduced the original 500-plus tribal entities to fewer than 100. This attrition wasn’t the result of colonial intervention but of indigenous struggle itself. The myth of the peaceful native collapses under the weight of archeological and ethnographic evidence. Tribal societies in California, like in the East, exhibited the full spectrum of human behavior: noble and cruel, artistic and violent.

Spain held California for 52 years. Mexico claimed it next, for a meager 27. Neither power treated the land as eternally sacred tribal territory. Nor did any surviving tribal leaders challenge their sovereignty in the language of permanent stewardship. When the United States acquired California in 1848 as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it did so not by force but by payment: $15 million in cash and $3.25 million in assumed debt. This was not theft, it was a transaction recognized under international law.

The real moment of moral scrutiny came not with the acquisition, but with the American decision to negotiate directly with the tribes. Between 1851 and 1852, the US signed 18 treaties with the remaining major tribal entities, including the Luiseño, Cahuilla, Serrano, and Diegueño. These tribes voluntarily ceded vast territories in exchange for designated reservation lands, livestock, food, and goods. The Treaty with the Dieguino, for instance, exchanged lands for 1,800 head of beef cattle, blankets, and clothing. Critics call these treaties unjust, but if one argues the tribes were too weak or simple to make such agreements, one strips them of their dignity, their rationality, and their sovereignty.

Were these treaties honored? Some were, some weren’t. The US Senate, bowing to political pressure kept them secret for years. But despite this reality, almost all tribes retained occupancy on designated lands. By the mid-20th century, the federal government attempted to correct these injustices through the Rancheria Act of 1958, which granted property rights to approximately 3,000 California Indians, roughly 15 percent of the state’s indigenous population. These lands were not merely symbolic. They were tangible assets, capable of development, sale, and economic growth.

Today, over 30 California Rancherias operate gaming enterprises on those lands, with revenues surpassing $8 billion annually. The Morongo and San Manuel Bands have built thriving casino resorts, contributing to tribal self-sufficiency and local economies alike. These outcomes are not the fruits of a theft left unremedied but of a dynamic and evolving relationship between tribes and the federal government, one in which rights, property, and recognition have been negotiated over time.

To call California “stolen land” is to deny this history of tribal warfare, to erase the diplomatic agency of native leaders, and to ignore the billions in modern tribal wealth generated from what was once federally distributed land. Far from being a colonial crime scene frozen in amber, California has been a palimpsest of competing sovereignties for millennia. If the passage of land from one sovereign to another is theft, then history itself is a long litany of larceny, one in which every people is both victim and victor, conqueror and conquered.

But perhaps the most insidious error in the “stolen land” narrative is its condescension. It suggests that native peoples were mere pawns, helpless against the cunning of European diplomats or the guns of American soldiers. It denies them the ability to strike bargains, to fight when necessary, and to accept peace when wise. The tribes of California were many things, but they were not children. They were shrewd, adaptable, and as politically calculating as any European power.

In fact, by the time of the US acquisition, only 18 tribal entities held land of any strategic consequence. These were not distant memory-keepers of a vanished culture, they were its stewards, and they chose to parley. They chose to survive. Many have since thrived.

Land changes hands. It always has. And in California it has done so by spear and by signature, by warpath and by wagon. To insist that one particular moment in that sequence constitutes a unique and unforgivable theft is not historical analysis, it is theater. It turns an intricate history of violence, commerce, diplomacy, and adaptation into a morality play in which one side is forever villain, the other forever victim.

This is not only false. It is unjust.

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The Ideological Aim Of Juneteenth Was To Replace The Fourth Of July


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

Let us begin with a simple proposition: a nation that loses grip on historical truth will soon lose the very liberty it claims to defend. In the case of Juneteenth, the official narrative peddled by government institutions and media organs insists that June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. It did not. The same narrative suggests that slaves in Galveston, Texas, were ignorant of their freedom until Union General Gordon Granger arrived and read General Order No. 3 from a balcony. That too is false.

So, why the deception? Why enshrine a historical inaccuracy into federal law, complete with flags, hashtags, and official observances? The answer lies not in a celebration of liberty, but in its quiet replacement. Juneteenth, far from being a spontaneous commemoration of emancipation, is a politically engineered holiday whose true function is to decenter the Fourth of July, recast the American Founding as a fraud, and promote a new narrative steeped not in liberty, but in grievance. At bottom, Juneteenth is not about celebrating the end of slavery. It is about reinterpreting the American project itself.

Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

To understand why, we must begin by clarifying the two foundational myths upon which Juneteenth rests.

First, it is not true that the enslaved people of Galveston only discovered they were free on June 19, 1865. Historical evidence clearly demonstrates that the Emancipation Proclamation was published widely in Texas newspapers, including the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph as early as February 2, 1863. Galveston, a major port city, had direct access to this information. Moreover, slave narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration confirm that news traveled fast among the enslaved. Felix Haywood, a former slave from Texas, remembered vividly, “Oh, we knowed what was goin’ on in it all the time… We had papers in dem days jus’ like now.” Slaves did not live in informational quarantine.

Second, and more damning, is the simple historical fact that slavery did not end on June 19, 1865. That date marks the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, and only in Texas. Slavery persisted in Union-loyal states such as Delaware and Kentucky for nearly six more months. On June 19, 1865, over 227,000 Americans remained legally enslaved. Not until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, were those people truly and legally freed. If one were seeking a holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in America, December 6 would be the logical choice. Yet Juneteenth was chosen. Why?

To answer that question, one must consider the architects of Juneteenth’s national elevation. The push to federalize the holiday accelerated in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020, a period marked not by unity but by division, not by historical celebration but by symbolic iconoclasm. Statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were defaced or toppled. The American flag itself was reimagined by progressive activists as a symbol of systemic oppression. In that context, Juneteenth became useful not as a historical commemoration, but as a cultural replacement, a new moral center.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with commemorating emancipation. But Juneteenth does not do this honestly. Instead, it inserts a deliberately misleading narrative into the American consciousness, one that suggests slavery ended not through constitutional means, not through war and statesmanship, but through a lone Union general bringing news to an isolated group of ignorant slaves. It recasts emancipation not as the culmination of the American project, but as a necessary correction to its founding. In doing so, it subtly poisons the well of American civic pride.

The mainstream media’s repeated claim that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in America is not just mistaken, it is irresponsible. Worse, it reveals an underlying ideological motive. If the Fourth of July celebrates the birth of a nation founded on liberty, Juneteenth is fast becoming its foil, a holiday that implies that liberty was a lie, that 1776 was hypocrisy incarnate, and that true justice only arrived by federal bayonet in Galveston. Such framing is not merely revisionist; it is revolutionary.

Cultural Marxism is often derided as a conspiratorial term, but the essence of the critique is straightforward. In place of economic revolution, it promotes cultural revolution: dismantling Western traditions, symbols, and moral narratives to clear the way for a new social order. Juneteenth fits neatly within this paradigm. It is not an apolitical holiday. It is an ideological tool, useful for reframing American identity around victimhood and systemic injustice.

If this seems harsh, consider the coordinated media campaign surrounding Juneteenth. NPR, PBS, and the New York Times have all run pieces uncritically parroting the falsehood that June 19 marked the end of slavery in the US. School curricula increasingly highlight Juneteenth while diminishing Independence Day. Government offices fly the Juneteenth flag, a symbol that didn’t exist two decades ago, with greater enthusiasm than they display the American flag. Even corporations like Amazon and Nike promote Juneteenth with the kind of vigor once reserved for the Fourth of July. None of this is accidental.

The effect, intentional or not, is to suggest that the real America began not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but in 1865, at the end of slavery. This is the same conceptual pivot that underlies the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which argues that America’s true founding began with the arrival of the first slaves, not the drafting of the Constitution. That project, like Juneteenth, seeks to invert the American story: liberty becomes accidental, oppression becomes essential.

There is a revealing story about how Donald Trump first encountered the push for Juneteenth as a national holiday. In 2020, during the planning of a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, originally scheduled for June 19, Trump was unaware of the date’s political and cultural significance. A Black Secret Service agent informed him of the controversy, explaining the nature of Juneteenth and why activists were pushing its prominence. Trump promptly rescheduled the rally to June 20, citing respect for the holiday. He later quipped that he had made Juneteenth “very famous” by drawing national attention to it. Far from resisting its elevation, Trump was initially unaware of the ideological momentum behind it, which only underscores how rapidly the holiday was weaponized by political elites to rewrite national symbolism. When Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, it was not because the public demanded it, but because the political class saw its utility in reframing the American narrative.

The irony is that the true story of American emancipation is one of triumph: a brutal war fought to extend the promise of the Declaration to all citizens. Lincoln understood this. So did Frederick Douglass. So did the men who fought and died at Gettysburg. That story deserves honor. But Juneteenth does not tell it. Instead, it substitutes a fable: a handful of slaves in a remote part of Texas learning, belatedly and for the first time, that they were free. It’s a compelling story, but it is not history.

A better holiday might be “December Sixth,” marking the actual legal end of slavery. It would anchor emancipation in the text of the Constitution rather than the dramatic flourish of a Union general’s order. But such a holiday would not serve the ideological purpose Juneteenth now fulfills. It would point us back to the genius of the Founding and the fulfillment of its promises, not away from it.

Juneteenth, as currently framed, is a myth masquerading as a milestone. It deserves scrutiny, not sanctification. For history’s sake, and liberty’s, we must insist on truth.

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What Bluesky Reveals About Progressive Intolerance


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

The collapse of viewpoint diversity on Bluesky is neither a fluke nor a recent regression. It is, rather, the predictable consequence of importing the cultural logic of elite academia, progressive journalism, and activist politics into a digital commons. What has emerged is not a neutral platform but a curated ideological enclave, a gated garden of enforced agreement. Far from modeling a healthy democratic discourse, Bluesky illustrates what happens when the infrastructure of debate is subordinated to the politics of purity.

Consider the origin story. Bluesky launched as a decentralization project initiated under Jack Dorsey, its purpose ostensibly noble: to build a more open, federated alternative to Twitter. But the timing of its mass adoption tells the real story. Following Elon Musk‘s acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, and the subsequent rollback of opaque censorship mechanisms that had disproportionately silenced conservatives, there was a liberal exodus. The appeal of Bluesky was never just technical. It was ideological. It became the place to be not because it offered better features or user interface, but because it offered a perceived reprieve from heterodoxy.

The stampede began in earnest after Trump’s reelection in November 2024. For many progressives, his return to power signaled not merely a political loss, but an existential crisis. Twitter, now X, had ceased to be the enforcement arm of consensus. What followed was a migration from a newly pluralistic platform to one where progressive assumptions remained unchallenged. Bluesky’s user base exploded from around 10 million in fall 2024 to over 35 million by spring 2025, most of whom, according to Pew and Business Insider, self-identified as left-of-center.

This demographic uniformity seeded the platform’s rapid ideological calcification. The environment quickly began to mimic the echo chambers of elite universities and major newsrooms. These institutions, as numerous studies show, already suffer from significant ideological skew. For instance, a 2023 Harvard survey found that more than 77 percent of its faculty identified as liberal, with just 2 percent identifying as conservative. FIRE’s 2024 national faculty survey revealed that 71 percent of professors believed a liberal colleague would “fit in” well in their department, while only 20 percent thought the same of a conservative one. Within such ecosystems, dissent becomes not only discouraged but pathologized.

Bluesky followed this trajectory with unsettling speed. Moderation policies and cultural norms effectively deputized users to enforce orthodoxy. Moderates were hounded, centrists were ignored, conservatives were banned. According to Newsweek and Politico, even users who aligned with 90 percent of the prevailing progressive views found themselves castigated for voicing a solitary note of dissent. What ensued was not dialogue but ideological inquisition.

Mark Cuban‘s disillusionment captures the dynamic in miniature. The billionaire investor joined Bluesky in November 2024 with the hopeful salutation, “Hello Less Hateful World.” By June 2025, he had reversed course. In a series of withering posts, Cuban described the atmosphere as toxic, dominated by users who weaponized moral language to silence disagreement. “Even if you agree with 95%,” he lamented, “if there is one point you question, they will call you a fascist.”

His criticism was not mere anecdote. It echoed a growing body of observations suggesting that Bluesky had become a “progressive bubble,” as the Washington Post phrased it, in which dissent invited mobbing and orthodoxy earned applause. That Cuban had financially backed a Bluesky-related application made his reversal all the more telling. Investment did not buy insulation from the inquisition.

Even on apolitical fronts, the consequences of this atmosphere were stifling. A Wharton professor researching artificial intelligence publicly announced his retreat from the platform after finding that any deviation from prevailing opinion, even on purely technical issues, elicited disproportionate backlash. The logic of purity had metastasized beyond politics, suffocating any form of nuanced discourse.

The irony is that while Bluesky was degenerating into a speech cartel, X was recovering. Despite breathless predictions of collapse, Elon Musk’s platform saw both advertiser return and user stability. As of early 2025, X boasted roughly 600 million monthly active users, with around 250 million logging in daily. According to Reuters and Finance Yahoo, ad revenue was projected to grow 17.5 percent in the US and 16.5 percent globally this year, reversing the post-boycott slump. The platform, now dominated by a rough parity of liberals and conservatives, had not devolved into chaos. It had become messy, yes, but it was free. And freedom, though often cacophonous, is what sustains democratic legitimacy.

Bluesky is what happens when speech is subordinated to civility. Or rather, when civility is used as a cudgel to enforce ideological conformity. The results mirror what we’ve seen in other progressive-dominated institutions. At The New York Times, dissenting editors like Bari Weiss resigned under pressure from internal cliques that policed language and punished transgression. At MSNBC, overt progressive bias has long eclipsed any pretense of ideological balance. Bluesky, built from the same cultural DNA, could not escape the same fate.

In fact, it amplifies it. For while a university campus is limited by geography and accreditation, and a media outlet by reputation and ratings, a social network like Bluesky can evolve into a micro-totalitarian regime in real time. There are no checks, no institutional constraints, no internal ombudsman. The result is the swift descent into purity spirals. Each user competes to be more righteous than the last. Each deviation, no matter how slight, is met with exaggerated condemnation.

To be clear, the problem is not that Bluesky is full of liberals. The problem is that it institutionalizes liberalism as an orthodoxy and punishes deviation, particularly deviation from within its own ranks. The right is not merely excluded, it is dehumanized, rendered so beyond the pale that any conservative presence is swiftly purged without ceremony. Yet the irony is that the most brutal penalties are reserved not for the outsider, but for the insufficiently orthodox insider. This is the slippery slope of ideological purity: disagreement from the right is unthinkable, while dissent from the left is treated as betrayal. In a healthy liberal democracy, disagreement is a feature, not a flaw. But Bluesky’s culture treats disagreement, even among liberals themselves, as an existential threat. That is the mark not of an open society but of an ideological sect.

One might argue that users self-select into platforms and that like-minded communities are inevitable. But this misses the deeper point. What Bluesky reveals is not merely digital tribalism, but a creeping authoritarianism within the cultural left. When faced with pluralism, this faction prefers segregation. When exposed to disagreement, it demands removal. This same instinct has crept into institutional politics, where Democrats have increasingly abandoned democratic norms in the name of saving democracy itself. They changed party rules to retroactively invalidate David Hogg’s election as Vice Chair of the DNC after realizing he might challenge the status quo. They denied Democratic delegates any choice by mandating a vote for Kamala Harris alone, with no write-ins or alternatives permitted. And they cheered on state-level efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot entirely, not through electoral means but by weaponizing bureaucratic technicalities. Bluesky, in this light, is not an outlier but a symptom. It does not want to compete in the marketplace of ideas; it wants to monopolize it.

This explains why, paradoxically, Bluesky’s rapid growth has not translated into cultural relevance. Despite an initial ballooning user base, its influence wanes because its ecosystem is self-limiting. The platform has begun shedding active users, and those who remain are posting with diminishing frequency. What is there left to talk about? You either agree or you are kicked out. There is no room for disagreement, so there is no reason for discussion. Echo chambers do not produce innovation. They produce repetition. And repetition, even when loud, cannot compete with the chaotic energy of a truly open forum.

Bluesky is the canary in the coal mine, signaling what digital speech looks like under progressive orthodoxy: aesthetically sleek, rhetorically inclusive, and intellectually inert. It functions not as a public square, but as a chapel of ideological conformity, complete with rituals of cancellation and catechisms of belief. Its growth is not a testament to its health, but to the deep yearning among many on the left to avoid disagreement at any cost.

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Free Speech On Trial: X Corp. Vs. Letitia James


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

The recent lawsuit filed by X Corp against New York‘s Stop Hiding Hate Act is not merely a corporate tantrum over regulatory friction. It is, rather, a constitutional litmus test: Can the state compel a private media platform to speak? And more precisely, can it compel that speech in a format and on topics it deems urgent, namely, hate speech, misinformation, extremism, and other politically volatile categories, without violating the First Amendment?

The answer, both doctrinally and philosophically, is no. Not if we take our constitutional commitments seriously. Not if we believe in a press that is free not merely to report, but to decline to report. Not if we recall that a regime which mandates orthodoxy is functionally indistinguishable from one that punishes dissent. To compel speech is to conscript conscience, and in the digital agora of social media, the stakes for freedom of editorial judgment could hardly be higher.

The First Amendment, robustly construed, protects not only the right to speak, but the right not to speak. That protection is no less vital for corporate speakers than for individuals. In West Virginia v. Barnette, the Court affirmed this principle unambiguously: The state cannot compel an individual to salute the flag or recite its creed. Why? Because the very act of compulsion transforms opinion into obedience, conscience into compliance. What applies to schoolchildren surely applies to modern publishers.

New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act runs afoul of this principle by requiring large social media platforms to disclose their content moderation policies and practices, specifically regarding “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and similar categories. The state’s rationale is couched in noble rhetoric: transparency, accountability, democracy. But the effect, and indeed the intent, is to conscript editorial judgment. It commands platforms to articulate their policies in state-approved terms, to issue periodic reports on state-specified topics, and to do so under the threat of $15,000-per-day penalties.

That is compelled speech, and compelled speech on matters of contested opinion. What counts as “misinformation” today may be conventional wisdom tomorrow. What is labeled “hate speech” often reflects the moral intuitions of cultural elites rather than objective legal categories. To force a platform like X to define, report on, and implicitly denounce such categories is to force a particular viewpoint, to transform a speaker into a conduit for the state’s ideological agenda.

The Supreme Court has been consistently wary of such state overreach. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo, the Court struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers to give equal space to political candidates they criticized. Even though the law aimed at fairness, the Court recognized it for what it was: a form of compelled speech that intruded on editorial discretion. The choice of what to publish, and what to withhold, is part of what makes a speaker free.

The same logic animates more recent decisions. In National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, the Court invalidated California’s attempt to force pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion services. The law was struck down not because the information was false, but because it compelled speakers to convey messages they found objectionable.

New York’s law suffers from the same defect. It does not merely ask platforms to be clear about their terms of service. It demands that they speak in a particular voice, about particular topics, in a state-sanctioned format. That is not regulation of conduct; it is regulation of speech. And it is presumptively unconstitutional.

The Ninth Circuit reached precisely this conclusion in X Corp v. Bonta, a case challenging California’s nearly identical transparency law, AB 587. That court found the law unconstitutional on its face, noting that the compelled disclosures were non-commercial speech on deeply controversial topics, triggering strict scrutiny. The state failed that scrutiny because there were less intrusive means to achieve its goals, and because the law’s real aim appeared to be ideological enforcement, not mere transparency.

The Stop Hiding Hate Act is, if anything, worse. Where California’s law was relatively restrained, New York’s law comes armed with sharper teeth: higher penalties, broader categories, and a clear animus against X Corp’s editorial philosophy. Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have publicly criticized Elon Musk‘s management of X, decrying what they see as an irresponsible tolerance for hate and extremism. But if that is the state’s concern, its remedy must be speech of its own, not coercion of others.

Viewpoint neutrality is a bedrock requirement of any law that touches expression. In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court struck down a hate speech ordinance because it punished speech based on viewpoint. The government may not pick sides in the marketplace of ideas, nor may it burden one side of a debate because it finds its views distasteful. Yet that is precisely what the Stop Hiding Hate Act does. By mandating reporting only on negative categories of speech, hate, extremism, misinformation, it sends a clear message: Platforms must account for their failure to suppress ideas the state disfavors.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Judicial analysis of New York’s earlier Hateful Conduct Law found the same flaw. In Volokh v. James, Judge Andrew Carter enjoined enforcement of that law, finding that it compelled speech and chilled protected expression. The parallels to the current statute are striking, and the constitutional defects just as fatal.

Defenders of the law argue that social media companies are different. They are not publishers, they say, but infrastructure. Carriers. Utilities. That argument fails both as a matter of law and logic. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that platforms exercise editorial discretion, and are thus speakers. In Reno v. ACLU, the Court treated the internet as a medium deserving of full First Amendment protection. And in NetChoice v. Moody, the Eleventh Circuit recognized that content moderation decisions are expressive acts, entitled to constitutional safeguards.

Moreover, the compelled disclosures in question are not neutral. They do not merely report numerical data or objective facts. They require platforms to explain how they define “hate,” how they identify “misinformation,” and what policies they have to remove or mitigate such content. These are ideological questions, not technical ones. To answer them is to express a worldview.

The editorial freedom of platforms is also essential to the integrity of the digital public square. Just as newspapers decide which op-eds to publish and which letters to discard, platforms decide which voices to elevate and which to suppress. Their choices shape public discourse, for better or worse. But those choices must remain theirs. If the government can dictate how they define controversial categories of speech, it can eventually dictate whom they must ban, what they must delete, and what they must feature.

And what of Section 230? Though not directly at issue in this case, the spirit of that provision underscores a broader point: Congress has long understood that platforms need leeway to moderate content without fear of liability. New York’s law, while framed as a disclosure regime, indirectly penalizes moderation choices by turning them into targets for state scrutiny. That functionally contradicts the federal policy of encouraging free and diverse platforms.

This is not to say that platforms bear no responsibility. X Corp, like any publisher, is accountable to its users, its advertisers, and the public. But that accountability must be exercised through the voluntary mechanisms of the market, not the coercive arm of the state. The state can speak, advocate, and condemn. It can encourage platforms to do better. But it cannot force them to explain their decisions in its own preferred terms.

We must also attend to the dangers of precedent. Today, New York compels speech about hate and disinformation. Tomorrow, a different state may compel speech about patriotism, election integrity, or gender ideology. Once we allow government to mandate ideological reporting, the slope becomes not only slippery but unavoidable. The protection of editorial discretion, even for unpopular or eccentric platforms, is the bulwark against state orthodoxy.

In sum, the Stop Hiding Hate Act violates the First Amendment by compelling speech, intruding on editorial discretion, and discriminating based on viewpoint. It is neither narrowly tailored nor supported by a compelling interest that cannot be pursued through less invasive means. The law’s defects are legal, philosophical, and practical.

X Corp’s challenge to the Act, then, is not merely defensible, it is necessary. If we value the principle that the government cannot dictate what private speakers say, or how they say it, we must defend it when it is tested. That principle, like speech itself, must be protected not only in easy cases, but especially in hard ones.

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The National Injunction Crisis Is Threatening Global Stability


Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]

Washington did not freeze at Valley Forge, nor did Lincoln bleed the Union at Gettysburg, so that two and a half centuries later, federal judges could rewrite American foreign policy from a bench in Boston. Yet here we are: unelected district court judges issuing orders with global repercussions, shackling the executive branch, endangering diplomacy, and destabilizing entire regions.

The case of D.V.D. v. DHS, now immortalized in Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s sworn declaration, is the most vivid and alarming example yet. A single judge, Brian E. Murphy, appointed by President Joe Biden, has upended delicate international arrangements, disrupted military coordination in a counter-terrorism hotspot, and jeopardized humanitarian efforts across the Horn of Africa, all with a flourish of his gavel.

This is not justice, it is judicial imperialism. And if it is not stopped, it will unravel the fabric of constitutional government.

Let us begin with the basics. The Constitution vests foreign policy authority in the executive branch. Article II is unambiguous. The President “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers,” and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, “make Treaties.” In practice, the president, through the Secretary of State, negotiates with foreign powers, calibrates the tone and tenor of our international presence, and oversees the strategic deployment of both soft power and military muscle.

The judiciary, by contrast, was never intended to function as a foreign policy apparatus. The Federalist Papers make this clear. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse.” Its power “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” Yet what we see today is the inverse: a judiciary with the will of a legislature and the force of an executive.

Consider the chaos Judge Murphy has sown. Secretary Rubio’s declaration outlines how the judge’s May 20 injunction halted the removal of eight foreign nationals, including convicted felons, who were en route to South Sudan, rerouting them into Djibouti instead. This was not a harmless detour. It required US diplomats to scramble and re-explain our shifting commitments to a key regional partner. It delayed counter-terrorism operations headquartered at the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. It chilled humanitarian coordination efforts in famine-stricken zones. It even postponed a major energy deal in Libya, costing American enterprise and reducing our leverage in a country already teetering on civil war.

What gives one man sitting in a courthouse on the East Coast the authority to rewrite US policy in Tripoli, Juba, and Djibouti? What constitutional principle justifies such reach?

None. But the vehicle of this judicial arrogance is the nationwide injunction, a tool so radical, so constitutionally suspect, and so corrosive to governance that even liberal legal scholars have begun to question its proliferation. Justice Clarence Thomas, prescient as ever, warned in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that nationwide injunctions “have a tendency to encourage forum shopping, politicize the judiciary, and deprive other courts of the ability to weigh in on legal questions.”

Indeed, if one sympathetic judge can block an executive action across all 50 states, then the presidency is no longer unitary, it is hostage. Foreign leaders are not engaging with the United States government, but with whichever district judge last issued a ruling. Our diplomacy becomes erratic, our word less reliable, our authority diluted.

This distortion of power is not theoretical. It is real, and it is recurring. Remember when a district court blocked President Trump’s ban on travel from terrorism-prone countries in 2017? That nationwide injunction, issued by Judge James Robart in Washington, not only overruled the president’s national security judgment but also forced foreign governments to reevaluate their cooperation with US intelligence, uncertain if the courts or the White House were truly in charge.

The incentive structure is equally perverse. Activist groups now scour the country for friendly judges, ideological allies with a record of lawfare activism, then file lawsuits not to win narrow relief for plaintiffs, but to engineer sweeping political victories that Congress never authorized and voters never endorsed. These are not lawsuits, they are stealth coups.

One need not be a strict textualist to grasp the danger here. Imagine if a single judge could halt a military deployment, override a treaty, or block a Secretary of State from evacuating embassy personnel. We are sliding into precisely that paradigm. The judiciary, far from checking the executive, is usurping its powers outright. The result is paralysis, confusion, and an erosion of the separation of powers upon which our constitutional order depends.

The problem is compounded when the judiciary aligns itself with globalist NGOs and open-borders ideologues. In D.V.D., the class members whose deportations were halted include not just migrants with questionable asylum claims but convicted criminals. By granting them judicial sanctuary, the court effectively overrides the State Department’s security assessments, replacing sovereign discretion with ideological dogma. Is the court prepared to vet these individuals itself? Is Judge Murphy better informed on regional conflicts in the Horn of Africa than the National Security Council? Or is this just another example of a liberal judge indulging his priors at the expense of the republic?

The stakes are high. With the return of President Trump to office and the reshaping of America’s global posture, the courts must not become a backdoor veto. We are witnessing a transition away from the apologetic diplomacy of the Obama-Biden years toward a policy of strength, reciprocity, and unapologetic national interest. That pivot cannot be sabotaged by judges still committed to the prior regime.

What is to be done? First, the Supreme Court must act on the opportunity already before it. The Court has heard oral arguments in a pending case involving birthright citizenship that includes critical questions about the legitimacy and scope of nationwide injunctions. All that remains is a decision. The Court should use this case to strike down the practice as inconsistent with Article III limitations on judicial power. Such rulings should be confined to the parties before the court, not the entire country. Injunctions should bind defendants only to the extent necessary to provide relief to plaintiffs, not to reshape executive policy for 330 million Americans.

Second, Congress should act. A statute should clarify that nationwide injunctions exceed the judicial power under the Constitution. This would restore balance, eliminate forum shopping, and return the courts to their proper role: arbiters of disputes, not architects of foreign policy.

Finally, the executive must resist. The State Department and DHS should not preemptively concede to every nationwide injunction as a fait accompli. Where there is ambiguity or statutory discretion, the administration should assert its prerogatives. The president is elected. The judge is not. Accountability matters.

History offers little comfort to those who allow unelected tribunals to dictate the terms of sovereignty. Empires have collapsed under the weight of judicial excess. Rome, after all, did not fall to barbarians alone, but to internal legal sclerosis and a metastasized bureaucracy. If we do not rein in our courts, we will cede our republic to the whims of the courts and socialist courts at that.

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SFFAS 56: The Secret Loophole Hiding Billions In Fraud, Waste & Abuse Discovered By DOGE


Imagine a vast ledger, chronicling the transactions of a mighty republic, now riddled with deliberate gaps and omissions, gaps no auditor may probe, no citizen may question. This is no fanciful dystopia, but the present reality, quietly authorized by what is known as Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56). While initially crafted, perhaps, with honorable intentions to shield ‘classified’ operations from hostile eyes, SFFAS 56 now threatens the very transparency and public accountability that sustain a free government. Federal agencies are allowed to use SFFAS 56 to hide spending they desire to be ‘classified’ from the American people, Congress, and even the President of the United States.

What is SFFAS 56? At its core, it is an administrative rule issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) in 2018, not a statute passed by Congress. It allows any federal agency to modify its financial statements in order to obscure sensitive national security information. This authority extends beyond the obvious domains of intelligence or defense, touching every department that produces General Purpose Federal Financial Reports, from USAID to the Department of Energy. In theory, this safeguard exists to prevent enemies from exploiting financial disclosures to learn state secrets. In practice, it creates a black hole into which billions of taxpayer dollars vanish without a trace.

To understand the peril, one must first grasp the astonishing breadth of the rule. Under SFFAS 56, agencies may alter financial reports by removing, aggregating or fabricating information, provided these adjustments do not “materially” affect the reported net results. Further, agencies can exclude entire sub-entities from reports or consolidate them elsewhere, masking not merely amounts but organizational structures themselves. Crucially, neither the public nor Congress is afforded any right to know when these modifications occur, how often they happen or the underlying reasons. A general, but nonspecific, disclaimer suffices, buried in the back pages of thick agency reports: “Accounting standards allow certain presentations and disclosures to be modified to prevent the disclosure of classified information.”

Even Congress itself can be kept in the dark unless an agency, by its own volition, deigns to disclose the concealment. Thus, SFFAS 56 effectively removes the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight. It conjures a legal purgatory where funds can be appropriated for one purpose, redirected for another and hidden altogether from elected representatives. The theoretical protections against abuse, internal controls, audits, classified oversight, are weak reeds indeed when the very financial data needed to detect mischief has been sanitized.

Proponents of SFFAS 56 argue that, without such protections, enemies could piece together vital intelligence from innocent-looking financial entries. Yet the ingenuity of our foes cannot justify the abandonment of self-government. If secrecy is to be justified, it must be rare, tightly controlled and explicitly authorized by the people’s elected representatives. Instead, SFFAS 56 inverts the burden: concealment becomes the default, accountability the exception. One might as well argue that because a handful of bank robbers lurk at large, all citizens must henceforth veil their account balances from scrutiny.

History offers sobering lessons when governments assume powers of secret spending. The clandestine financing of “black ops” during the Cold War, sometimes used for noble ends, sometimes for ignoble, occurred under conditions of limited and direct congressional oversight. Even then, abuses proliferated. The Iran-Contra affair revealed how easily noble motives could give way to clandestine mischief when oversight was thwarted. Now, SFFAS 56 institutionalizes a structure far broader and more opaque than anything Colonel Oliver North could have dreamed.

Under SFFAS 56, the Department of Defense could award lucrative contracts to politically connected firms and conceal both the recipient and the amount from public view. USAID could fund controversial NGOs both here and abroad without alerting Congress or the public. Worse still, agencies could funnel money to the family members of political figures or even, under a perverse interpretation, fund hostile entities abroad, all behind the iron curtain of “classified activities.”

Consider a hypothetical yet disturbingly plausible example. Suppose USAID wished to grant a billion dollars to the Clinton Foundation or the Open Society Foundation, ostensibly to support development projects in unstable regions. Concerned that public knowledge of such a grant might spark political controversy and, by some stretch, be construed as harmful to national security, the head of USAID could invoke SFFAS 56 to hide the transaction. No notification to the president would be required. Congress would remain unaware. The public, journalists and watchdog groups would find themselves stonewalled. Even if the agency head believed sincerely that the money would be wisely spent for a legitimate purpose, no one outside his immediate circle could help him ensure that actually happened. Oversight by the press, vigilant members of Congress or curious citizens would be thoroughly stymied.

Some may protest that the President retains control of the executive branch, and thus can police such abuses internally. But the president’s power is not omniscient. Unless agency heads choose to disclose their use of SFFAS 56, even the president may remain unaware of the specific expenditures being hidden. In effect, FASAB, a mere advisory board, has created a tool so potent that it outstrips the constitutional balance of powers itself.

The irony is sharp. Conservatives, rightly skeptical of administrative overreach, have long warned against the quiet accretion of unaccountable power by regulatory boards. Yet here lies one of the gravest examples: a board that issues “standards” more consequential than many laws, without democratic debate or meaningful constraint.

President Trump must act decisively. First, he should formally direct every agency head to audit the use of SFFAS 56 within their departments since 2018. For every instance, they must privately report to the president the recipient, the amount, the date and the justification for concealment. Such a review need not, and should not, compromise national security, but the chief executive must know whether public funds have been lawfully spent.

Second, the President should demand that the leaders of FASAB, particularly the current chair, George B. Scott, and Executive Director Monica R. Valentine, rescind or at least reform SFFAS 56. If they refuse, legislation must follow. Congress, spurred by the White House, must reassert its constitutional authority and mandate that no funds shall be expended without public disclosure unless specifically authorized by statute and subjected to classified presidential and congressional oversight.

It strains credulity that an executive board not directly answerable to voters or even the president should wield the power to dissolve financial transparency across the entire federal government. Even among classified programs, there are means of maintaining oversight without sacrificing security. Classified briefings, secure audits, special oversight committees, all these mechanisms exist and function in sensitive areas of defense and intelligence. What SFFAS 56 does is more radical: it banishes oversight by design.

In Federalist 51, Madison observed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” A corollary is clear: if governments were composed entirely of angels, perhaps SFFAS 56 would pose no danger. But human beings, tempted by self-interest, ambition and error, cannot be trusted with unchecked authority. Transparency and oversight are the sinews of a free republic. Without them, the Constitution is a parchment barrier.

Critics may claim that rolling back SFFAS 56 will impair national security. This is a false dilemma. It is possible to protect legitimate secrets while maintaining financial accountability. It is not necessary, indeed, it is dangerous, to dismantle the public’s right to know how its money is spent in the name of security.

SFFAS 56, well-intentioned or not, is an invitation to abuse. It is a standing temptation to the unscrupulous. It is a blindfold upon the eyes of the republic. It must be reformed, and if reform proves impossible, it must be repealed.

The ledger of a free people must be open and not riddled with secret ink. President Trump must insist that the light of public scrutiny shines once more upon the accounts of the United States. The integrity of the American experiment depends on it.

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FBI Reports: Teen Killed Parents as Part of Satanic Plot to Assassinate President Trump. Absolutely Frigging Chilling!


FBI Reports: Teen Killed Parents as Part of Satanic Plot to Assassinate President Trump

There’s a growing unease spreading across the heartland, a sense that the values holding our nation together are fraying at the edges. You’ve felt it too, right? That quiet disturbance beneath the surface of daily life, suggesting the foundations we once took for granted might be cracking. It whispers of challenges not just from distant shores, but from within our own communities, festering quietly.

This isn’t mere political disagreement; it feels deeper, more fundamental. It’s that unsettling feeling that bedrock principles – faith, family, respect for authority, the very fabric of Western civilization – are being steadily chipped away by forces that seem to prefer darkness to light, chaos to order. Makes you wonder where this is all headed, doesn’t it? What happens when the guardrails ensuring basic decency start to buckle under the strain?

We see the symptoms pop up, often dismissed by the mainstream as just isolated incidents, nothing to worry about. But thoughtful conservatives understand that sometimes these acts of depravity signal a more profound cultural sickness, a rot spreading unseen until it breaks through in the most shocking ways imaginable. Are we really paying attention or just hoping it goes away?

And then, bam, you get news like this out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, confirming those very fears. In a crime that chills the soul, investigators allege that a 17-year-old high school student, Nikita Casap, brutally murdered his own parents, Tatiana Casap and Donald Mayer, in their home back in February. The details paint a picture of calculated violence against the very people who gave him life and raised him. Just when you think the depths have been plumbed…

But the horror didn’t stop there. Indeed, it intensified dramatically when the FBI revealed the why behind the parricide. Court documents indicate this wasn’t just some tragic, albeit horrific, domestic dispute. Nope. Investigators state the teen killed his parents to gain the “financial means and autonomy” necessary for a far more sinister plot: the assassination of President Donald Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Unmasking the Hate

So, what kind of poison could drive a kid to this? According to the FBI, the teenager was swimming in a venomous cocktail of extremist ideologies. He was allegedly part of a “satanic cult” harboring “strong anti-Judaism anti-Christian and anti-western ideologies.” Further investigation has uncovered links to a neo-Nazi group called the Order of Nine Angles, praise for Adolf Hitler, and deeply antisemitic writings. Get this: Satanists and Nazis, apparently now swapping notes? You couldn’t script this stuff up, but it seems they found common ground in hating everything foundational and good to America and Judeo-Christian values.

The teen’s own manifesto, found by investigators, laid bare the chillingly blunt objective. It wasn’t just about some personal vendetta against President Trump; it was about deliberately destabilizing the nation itself. The goal was explicit: pure anarchy. His own words tell the chilling, if predictable, story:

“As to why, specifically Trump, most believe it’s pretty obvious. By getting rid of the president and perhaps the vice president, that would have guaranteed bringing in chaos.”

Supposedly points for honesty it would appear.

A Deeper Conspiracy?

Now, was this twisted plot conceived entirely in a teenager’s head? The court documents allege Casap aimed not just to kill the President but ultimately sought to overthrow the U.S. government. And naturally, there are whispers of outside contact. Investigators found evidence suggesting he was communicating with individuals in Russia about his plans and even plotting an escape to Ukraine. It certainly raises disturbing questions about who else might be involved, pulling strings or fanning flames.

Make no mistake, this wasn’t just some basement fantasy. Authorities stated the teen had purchased a drone and explosives for a potential attack – taking concrete steps. Casap’s later arrest in Kansas while driving his murdered stepfather’s car containing a handgun, stolen valuables, a pried-open safe, and $14,000 in cash, practically screaming premeditation and flight. He now faces a raft of felony counts, including first-degree intentional homicide, and potential federal charges for the assassination plot. Casap is being held on a $1 million bond. It should be no bond.

This entire horrifying episode serves as a brutal, flashing red light. It’s a reminder of the serious internal threats we face. The ideologies fueling such hatred – whether they call themselves Satanists, Nazis, or wave some other anti-American banner – feast on cultural decay and the rejection of traditional morality. They target not just individuals like President Trump, but the very stability, fabric and soul of our nation.

The fight against this darkness requires more than just hoping law enforcement catches them all. This isn’t just some news story; it demands a reaffirmation from us of the values that actually built this country: faith, strong families, respect for life, and unwavering patriotism. Are we just going to shrug this off or will we remain vigilant, recognize the signs of this rot, and stand firm in defending the principles that stand in stark opposition to the chaos these extremists crave?

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Lawmakers: CCPs influence on American investment must be stopped


As the U.S. and China escalate their tariff rates in an all-out trade war, two congressional committees held a joint hearing Wednesday on the problem of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on American investment and possible solutions.

The Chinese Communist Party is embedded in Chinese business to the extent that the assets of any American who has tried to do business in China, invests in the stock market, international index funds or mutual funds, or who has a 401K or pension invested in international index funds is at risk, according to TV personality and businessman Kevin O’Leary. O’Leary was called as an expert witness at the hearing.

The hearing was hosted by a House select committee that focuses on “strategic competition” between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and the Senate Special Committee on Aging, as the party’s involvement in the Chinese economy and financial scams stands to disproportionately impact older Americans, according to committee members.

“The [Chinese] government has chosen to be America’s enemy. Unfortunately, that’s not a problem that only our military intelligence community has to worry about,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-FL, chairman of the aging committee. “ If you have your retirement invested in anything that is controlled by or under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party, you are at risk of losing every dollar, and this could happen overnight.”

The senator went on to say that “there is no real private industry in China,” a point that was emphasized multiple times throughout the hearing by both committee members and the called witnesses.

O’Leary, an investor on the business reality TV show Shark Tank and the U.K.’s Dragon’s Den, said that China allows something called a “golden share,” which essentially de-privatizes private businesses. Any entity that purchases a golden share in a Chinese business – a small share, typically 1% – acquires disproportionate control of that company. A golden share can secure its owner a position on the company’s board or a certain level of authority over company decisions. The Chinese government buys these shares in companies it wants to influence, so that the Chinese Communist Party is deeply involved in companies that may appear private “on paper,” according to O’Leary.

In addition, the Chinese government doesn’t “play by the rules” of the World Trade Organization, even though it has been a member since 2001, according to O’Leary. This poses a real risk to Americans’ savings, according to Rep. John Moolenaar, R-MI.

“The CCP’s opaque regulatory regime, its disregard for the rule of law and its willingness to use financial tools for political gain present ongoing and significant dangers to American savings,” Moolenaar said.

O’Leary said that the Chinese Communist Party implements policies that disadvantage other countries in the Chinese economy but uses other countries’ legal systems against them to gain the upper hand in economic competition.

The party has passed “various laws in the realm of cyber security, espionage, intelligence and beyond and other mechanisms to control its corporations, industries and business partnerships, all to the detriment of U.S. investors,” O’Leary said.

The Chinese government doesn’t allow other countries to own shares of Chinese companies, for instance, while the U.S. “has given China preferential treatment for over a decade through its own special memorandum of understanding that governs accounting standards and oversight,” according to O’Leary.

“If we can’t own stocks in their country, they should not be allowed to own stocks in the U.S. Unless businesses can operate in China with the same freedoms that Chinese businesses have here, we should not let their businesses operate in the U.S.,” O’Leary said.

“Make no mistake, I want to do business in China, as do millions of other investors and companies, but we want a reciprocal ecosystem in place that is transparent,” he continued, saying the U.S. should leave China’s marketplace until its government implements significant reforms.

President and CEO of the American Securities Association Chris Iacovella said that even though China seemingly transitioned from a state-run to a free market economy decades ago, that’s not really what happened. Instead, China has “penetrated [American] capital markets” to build wealth and power. As a partial remedy, Iacovella said Congress should enact a ban against Chinese companies that engage in unlawful behavior from American markets.

“We have companies on the commerce list, on the DOD list, on the human rights list. These companies should not have access to our capital markets. They should not have access to anybody to be able to do business in this country,” Iacovella said.

A third expert witness called by the committee members was Brady Finta, founder of the National Elder Fraud Justice Coordination Center.

“I believe the scale of fraud against America’s elders has grown to epidemic proportions, and it’s time that we as a country treat it as such,” Finta told the committee members.

Finta worked to combat elder fraud in a previous position with the FBI but said the scale of the problem was so great, he and his team were able to address less than 1% of scams reported to them, even though only a fraction of people report the crimes committed against them.

Some committee members believed the CCP was either directly involved with international crime rings that perpetuate such scams, or at minimum, doesn’t actively deter them.

Finta suggested now is the time for a “whole of society response.” Separately, neither local, state nor federal law enforcement has the bandwidth to sustain a response that matches the magnitude of the problem. But if they joined together in elder justice task forces across the country and even partnered with the private sector, which has access to much of the data that is exploited, they could wage a much stronger fight, according to Finta.

“[Where] local and state resources can be used to support larger federal and international investigations, the effect of that is much greater than the individual investigations by local law enforcement,” Finta said.

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