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CNN anchor Chris Cuomo participated in adviser meetings with his brother New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and some of the senior aides who helped cover up the states nursing home scandal to determine the administrations response to the sexual harassment allegations against him, the Washington Post reports.

Chris reportedly joined multiple conversations with his Democratic brothers team to discuss and review how the governor should respond to the accusations.

The cable news anchor encouraged his brother to take a defiant position and not to resign from the governors office, the people said. At one point, he used the phrase cancel culture as a reason to hold firm in the face of the allegations, two people present on one call said, WaPo stated.

CNN acknowledged Chriss wrongdoing in a statement to WaPo but said they would not discipline him for the conflict of interest.

Chris has not been involved in CNNs extensive coverage of the allegations against Governor Cuomo on-air or behind the scenes. In part because, as he has said on his show, he could never be objective. But also because he often serves as a sounding board for his brother, CNN said. However, it was inappropriate to engage in conversations that included members of the Governors staff, which Chris acknowledges. He will not participate in such conversations going forward.

Chris repeatedly ran interference for his brother in the early months of the pandemic by joking around on live television and refusing to ask him questions about the rising nursing home death toll that resulted from the governors deadly policy. The anchor repeatedly brought his brother on his show during the peak of the governors response to COVID-19 in 2020, but now claims any further coverage of the family member would be a conflict of interest.

[READ: Enough With The Cuomo Brothers Yucking It Up On CNN. We Want Answers]

Obviously I am aware of what is going on with my brother. And obviously, I cannot cover it because he is my brother, Cuomo told his audience just a few months ago. Now, of course, CNN has to cover it. They have covered it extensively and they will continue to do so.

In addition to offering his brother friendly airtime, Chris also benefitted from the special COVID-19 testing privileges the Democrat governor afforded to his family and other well-connected figures in the state.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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CNN's Chris Cuomo Faces No Consequences After Colluding To Cover Up Brother's Scandals - The Federalist

A popular Boston radio host who held the attention of listeners in New England for more than 40 years threatened to quit his job on-air on Wednesday after being told by his boss that he couldnt joke about Demi Lovatos sudden pronoun change.

I am the biggest of all time. And they said Shut up, Matt. Stop talking. Well, I hope youre happy because I just stopped talking. Matty out, Matty Siegel, co-host of the Matty in the Morning show on WXKS-FM radio, said live.

During his segment on Wednesday morning, Siegel explained that he was simply going against the woke thing but quickly felt punished for his views on Lovatos decision to become nonbinary and use the pronouns they/them.

Its a joke, the whole binary thing, he said. I dont care what Demi Lovato does. But now we have to worry about you might offend someone.

This isnt the first time Siegel said he was chastised for offending people on air. Just last year, Siegel said his boss warned him against making nasty comments about Donald Trump on-air. These restrictions on his speech and content, Siegel said, take away from the point of his job.

We were having fun with it, and my boss called up and said that Id crossed the line and they didnt want me talking about it anymore, Siegel told Boston.com. I responded by saying, If I cant talk about what Im thinking at this point in my career, I dont want to be on the radio anymore.

While Siegel said he likes his boss personally and is very fond of him, he clearly disagreed with his superiors position on the issue and questioned numerous times on the air why someone would limit the abilities of a host with decades of experience and a top-rated show.

This is why I got rich. OK. Because I told it like it is to my listeners for 40 bleeping years, Siegel explained. They pulled the plug on me and said you cant talk about what youre talking about.

Despite his threat of quitting on Wednesday, Siegel hosted a broadcast on Thursday morning explaining that he had reached an agreement with the station that gave him the freedom to say what he wants and that his wife refused to let his career end over Demi Lovato.

Somebody had to say this is ridiculous, ya know. And the company was like, What, you cant talk about that. Its like somebody had to say, Are you kidding? Like lifes not complicated enough, now youre telling young people they dont know what they are, the host said on-air on Thursday morning.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Popular Boston Radio Host Threatened To Quit Over Demi Lovato's Pronouns - The Federalist

The Atlantics David Frum appears to be first out of the gate in what will likely become a coordinated, aggressive media campaign to defend the people and institutions that got the COVID-19 origin story wrong and absolve them of all responsibility, however complicit they might be and instead blame it all on Trump and his supporters.

It sounds stupid, I know, but its true. Frum thinks Trump and his tens of millions of supporters are not interested in weighing the evidence of the viruss origins, and only want payback for the political and cultural injuries inflicted on them by the scientists. The whole thing, for them, is just a weapon in a culture war here at home.

Leaving aside the deep irony that Frum, of all people, is accusing anyone of not being interested in weighing the evidence, we need to understand this opening salvo for the retcon job it is. Frum is preemptively exonerating the gatekeepers and experts who resisted, and in some cases actively opposed, any discussion or serious inquiry into the possibility that COVID -19 didnt emerge naturally but escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

If Trump and his supporters turn out to be right, then theyre right for the wrong reasons, says Frum.As Bret Weinstein noted, this is an attempt to fictionalize the history of the debate about COVIDs origins and immunize the corrupt people and institutions that were on the wrong side of that debate. (Frum, you have to admit, is the perfect person to lead the charge on this.)

The need for such a campaign has become apparent in recent days because the question of COVIDs origins isnt going away. There are two main theories: either the virus naturally jumped from animal to humans, or it was being studied and perhaps manipulated or enhanced in a lab and accidentally escaped.

A much-criticized report issued in March by a World Health Organization-led team dismissed the idea that the virus could have escaped from a lab, calling it extremely unlikely despite the team having no access to relevant records or data in China. It concluded animal origin was the more likely of the two possibilities. The WHO-led team, which included scientists from China, devoted just four of 313 pages in its report to the possibility that the virus came from a lab.

Then last week, a group of prominent scientists published a letter in the journal Science calling for a deeper investigation, including the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab by accident. The letters signatories include some of the worlds leading coronavirus researchers. One of them is Dr. Ralph Baric, who collaborated with Dr. Shi Zheng-li, Chinas foremost expert on bat viruses, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. They were trying to enhance the ability of bat viruses to infect humans.

The letter came just days after Nicholas Wade, a veteran science reporter for Nature and The New York Times, published a long essay laying out in great detail the evidence behind both origin theories. The takeaway from Wades piece is that the lab leak theory has a mountain of circumstantial evidence to support it, while the animal theory has absolutely nothing.

So why did the entire corporate media dismiss the lab leak theory as some crazy conspiracy theory last year? Well, because Trump and his supporters suggested it. When Sen. Tom Cotton last February had the temerity to note on Fox News that the virus emerged not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, The New York Times ran with the headline: Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.

Never mind that what Cotton actually said was rather mild: We dont have evidence that this disease originated there. But because of Chinas duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.

The Times reaction to Cotton was emblematic of corporate media at large. From the outset, very few journalists wanted to talk about the lab leak theory for fear of being tarred as a fringe conspiracy theorist. No major media organizations devoted resources to investigating the diseases origin, and almost no prominent scientists came forward to ask the tough questions that some of them are asking now.

Last May, in an interview with National Geographic, Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed the theory that COVID could have escaped from a lab. If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and whats out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated, Fauci said. Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.

When New York Magazine published a lengthy essay by Nicholson Baker in January, going over much of the same territory that Wade did last week, the silence from the rest of the corporate press was deafening. Baker cataloged in great detail the recent history of whats called gain-of-function research, which involves making naturally occurring viruses more potent, or transmissible, in an effort to predict what the next big pandemic-causing virus might be and prepare for it.

In recent decades, writes Baker, scientists have

made machines that mix and mingle the viral code for bat diseases with the code for human diseases diseases like SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, for example, which arose in China in 2003, and MERS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, which broke out a decade later and has to do with bats and camels. Some of the experiments gain of function experiments aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature.

Very few people even knew about such research before the pandemic. But Fauci did. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he supported funding for gain-of-function experiments as part of a broader strategy of vaccine development. If anyone might have insight into how such experiments might result in a lab accident that could trigger a pandemic, its him.

Yet he refuses to discuss any of this, even with members of Congress who ask him about it directly. If you missed the recent exchange between Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul on this subject, its worth watching in full, partly to see Faucis breathtaking arrogance and condescension, but mostly to see how he refuses to answer or even engage a fairly straightforward question.

Notice Faucis response. He insists in legalistic, carefully circumscribed language that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He repeats this, mantra-like, throughout his exchange with Paul, circling back to it every time the senator presses him on why the U.S. government was funding Barics collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But at one point Fauci pivots. Paul asks him if the National Institutes of Health has funded Barics gain-of-function research and Fauci says Baric doesnt do gain-of-function research, but then says, and if it is, its according to the guidelines and it is being done in North Carolina, not in China.

So, is Baric doing gain-of-function research, or not? Set aside whether its being done in China or North Carolina. Set aside whether the NIH was directly funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Does Fauci support such research? He wont say, and instead just keeps repeating his carefully parsed sentence that the NIH does not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Faucis evasion speaks volumes. If he were concerned, like the rest of us are, about the origins of COVID-19, if he really wanted to find out whether it might have been the result of gain-of-function research and somehow escaped from the lab in Wuhan, he wouldve gone to great lengths to answer Pauls questions and explain to the American people exactly what Baric was studying, and why, and how.

If Baric wasnt doing gain-of-function research, then what was he doing? Is it relevant to the pandemic? What was the extent of his collaboration with Shi and the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

At some point, hes going to have answer those questions, because the American people are going to demand concrete answers. Other prominent virologists are willing to talk about this, so why isnt Fauci?

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, said in a recent interview that, its important to just maintain scientific objectivity as we begin to look at the evidence for the ultimate origins of this particular virus, and that, Covid-19 is really distinctively different in that it entered into our awareness, and literally at the same time had very efficient human to human transmission. Thats not how zoonosis usually enter in the human species.

Now that prominent scientists like Redfield and others are saying such things, prominent journalists like Frum are scrambling to re-write the history of how their entire industry dismissed and demonized anyone who suggested COVID might have escaped from a lab.

Their hatred of Trump and his supporters made it impossible for them not to politicize the pandemic, to insist that COVID couldnt have escaped from a lab, because that would benefit Trump and validate his supporters. And now it will prevent them from telling the truth when the truth eventually comes out. Just watch.

Photo U.S. Navy / public domain

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The Media's COVID Origin Coverup Campaign Has Begun - The Federalist

Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignored the true reason to celebrate Cuban Independence Day, choosing to instead commemorate the day by celebrating the nations diversity instead.

Historically, Cubans celebrate May 20 for their independence from the U.S. in 1902 following the nations occupation after the Spanish-American war. The day observes the founding of the Republic of Cuba with the swearing-in of its first elected president Toms Estrada Palma. Blinkens tweet, however, appears to mischaracterize the holiday as one that celebrates the diversity of the Cuban people.

Today we recognize the strength and diversityof the Cuban people, Blinken wrote in a tweet on Thursday. The United States honors and stands with Cubans who pursue freedom and a more prosperous future, and we recommit to accompanying the Cuban people in their quest to determine their own future.

This view, as noted by Cuban media strategist Giancarlo Sopo, doesnt actually celebrate the formation of the Republic of Cuba. Instead, Blinkens message seems to be a bizarre way for Team Unity to reframe Cuban Independence Day as a woke holiday to appease domestic and Cuban leftists.

I dont know a Cubanhere or in the islandwho views 20 de mayo as a diversity holiday, Sopo explained.

The statement exemplifies the Democrats strange politics, Sopo continued. On one hand, they reframe Cuban Independence in woke terms to appease their US base. On the other, they avoid any mention of 20 de mayos actual purpose to avoid angering the Cuban regime, which doesnt recognize it.

This tiptoeing by the presidents principal adviser on U.S. foreign policy, Sopo concluded, is a failed attempt at Latino outreach.

This statement is the kind of culturally incompetent and ill-conceived Latino outreach effort that characterized Biden. Cuban Americans will think it is stupid and pointless. And the regime will be annoyed you released *anything* 20 de mayo related in the first place, he concluded.

This isnt Blinkens first diplomatic blunder since assuming his position representing. In February, Blinken posted a photo of himself posing in front of an upside-down Mexican flag paired with a message about his virtual meeting with Mexican leaders regarding regional migration, illegal border crossings, and trade.

He also rhetorically cowered in a meeting with Chinese diplomats in Anchorage, Alaska during discussions about the communist regimes attitudes towards Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States, economic coercion of our allies.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Secretary Of State Hails Cuban Independence Day As A Celebration Of 'Diversity' - The Federalist

Former President Donald Trump blasted the New York attorney generals investigation into the Trump Organization on Wednesday as a nothing more than an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime.

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday that her office would join the Manhattan district attorneys probe into the Trump Organization, expanding its scope from merely a civil investigation into a criminal one. James had already been investigating the group since 2019 in a potential civil lawsuit.

Trump decried the lawsuit as politically motivated after being under investigation from the time I came down the escalator 5 years ago, including the fake Russia Russia Russia Hoax, the 2 year, $48M, No Collusion Mueller Witch Hunt, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment hoax #2, and others.

The Attorney General of New York literally campaigned on prosecuting Donald Trump even before she knew anything about me, Trump said in a Wednesday statement. She said that if elected, she would use her office to look into every aspect of my real estate dealings. She swore that she would definitely sue me.

One-hundred days into her job, James animosity toward the president was proved true, earning a headline in CNN, The New York AGs first 100 days of war against Trump, in April 2019. James was elected in 2018.

I have built a great company, employed thousands of people, and all I do is get unfairly attacked and abused by a corrupt political system, Trump wrote.

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Trump Decries New York Investigation As 'Corrupt' In 'Search Of A Crime' - The Federalist

After budget cuts and months of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioting, Seattles Police Chief indicated Wednesday that nearly 20 percent of the citys police officers have left in the past year and a half.

The support that we had in my generation of policing is no longer there, veteran Officer Clayton Powell told CBS News, concurring with Interim Police Chief Adrian Diazs assessment. More than 260 officers have quit the force since the beginning of last year.

Following the death of George Floyd, protests and riots erupted in Seattle. Amid radicals looting and attacking police, Seattles homicide rate spiked to a 26-year high. Nonetheless, the Seattle council attempted to slash the police departments budget once more, but to no avail. During the particular uptick in crime, the number of deployable officers in the left-wing stronghold was about 1,200. This is the lowest since 1990.

Jason Rantz, a Seattle-based talk show host on KTTH Radio and a frequent guest on Fox News, told The Federalist that the numbers youre getting only tell a small part of the picture.

You have dozens of officers who are burning their sick and vacation time and will exit the force afterward, Rantz said. You have officers who are applying elsewhere and booked to turn in their equipment and uniform, which means they will be gone but havent yet been reported as part of the separations yet.

Diaz was asked by CBS whether the number of officers leaving the force is concerning, to which he said, It does because we saw our shootings go up. We saw our homicides go up. Indeed, there was a 61 percent spike in murders in 2020 from a year prior. In a memorandum on Jan. 11, Diaz acknowledged the tremendous spike.

Carmen Best, the former Police Chief, left the force after 28 years in March. She announced her decision in August 2020 as a protest against the $3 million worth of funding that the city slashed. 100 officers were either laid off or could not keep working at the department after the budget cut.

We will hit close to or exceed 300 separations by the end of this month since the crisis accelerated last year. This is unheard of. Consequently, you have extremely low staffing numbers in this city, at times below minimal staffing numbers, Rantz told The Federalist.

Cities across the U.S. have moved to defund the police and it has only exacerbated crime. From Minneapolis, New York City, Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles far-left Democrats have stripped jobs from officers and harmed communities more susceptible to have rioting and looting.

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Nearly 20 Percent Of Seattle Police Force Quits Following Defunding And Black Lives Matter Riots - The Federalist

More than 20 groups have banded together to submit comments opposing the Biden administrations proposed rule mandating taxpayer-funded abortions.

Historically, Title X is devoted to family planning and providing preventative birth control methods to low-income families. Abortion has largely been excluded by Congress to avoid having taxpayers fund the killing of babies in the womb. Under the Trump administration, Planned Parenthood and other abortion organizations even opted out of receiving federal funding to avoid the separation finalized in 2019 between Title X services and abortion.

Under the Ensuring Access to Equitable, Affordable, Client-Centered, Quality Family Planning Services proposal, however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would remove the financial and physical separation in funding between Title X activities and abortion activities, circumvent statutes and laws to discourage parental and familial involvement in abortion decisions, and remove certain reporting and regulatory stipulations. The rule would also require providers to give abortion counseling and referrals, even if their objections are protected under the Weldon Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Among the groups that are opposed to this proposed measure include conservative think tanks, pro-life organizations, and religious institutions such as Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Women for America, the Ethics & Public Policy Center, the Heritage Foundation, the March for Life, the Religious Freedom Institute, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops seeking relief and protections for conscience-based objections.

Most Americans reject the idea of abortion being used for birth control, which is why they dont want to fund abortion providers through the Title X program, said Roger Severino, Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and former director of the Office of Civil Rights at HHS. President Biden wants to change the rules to bail out his friends in the abortion industry, who care more about abortion than actual family planning. People are pushing back against an extreme president and HHS secretary who want to not only force people to refer for abortion but have taxpayers fund such taking of life.

The public comment period ends on Monday.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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20 Groups Band Together To Oppose Biden's Push For Taxpayer-Funded Abortions - The Federalist

Has-beens, might-have-beens, and never-weres will not move the Republican Party past Trump. Their latest stunt is another group project the Call for American Renewal that threatens to form a third party. Once again, the Never Trump dead-enders will try anything to take back the GOP from Donald Trump; anything, of course, other than appealing to actual Republican voters.

Yes, the GOP needs a new leader. Yet the way to move on from Trump is to move on from Trump, instead of keeping the political world revolving around him.

Trump is now another Florida retiree. Kicked off major social media, he has started a blog that only draws a fraction of his former audience. While he still has influence, he is increasingly irrelevant to the day-to-day work of Republican politics in statehouses and DC.

Thus, there is a strong case to be made that ignoring Trump is the best option currently available to Republicans. Time and irrelevance may sap affection for Trump more than direct attacks ever have. In contrast, endlessly debating the Trump years from the 2016 Republican Party primary to the capitol riot will not move the party forward.

Although doing so may please the small portion of the GOP that wants to see Trump officially repudiated, ultimately, it will only keep rallying the former presidents staunchest supporters while annoying the rest of us. Few Republicans regret supporting Trump over Joe Biden, even if they think it will be time for someone new in 2024.

Keeping the focus on Trump only helps him maintain his primacy for Republican voters. But many of the former presidents enemies dont care that they are helping sustain the man they purport to disdain. For all their talk of character, the current remnants of Never Trump include some of the worst creeps in politics, from the Lincoln Projects sexual predators and grifters to Holocaust deniers. Such people are politically relevant only because of their opposition to Trump; if he fades, they disappear as well.

Thus, instead of keeping the spotlight on Trump, those who genuinely want a post-Trump GOP should focus on developing better options politically as well as in personality and policy. Importantly, any alternatives need to be superior in the estimation of voters, not just consultants, pundits, and ex-officials.

Promoting better political options than Trump and his imitators means finding winners, not a washed-up former something-or-other to announce he is leaving the GOP (again). Rather than attacking Trumps past misdeeds real, exaggerated, and imagined the GOPs future political champions will be found doing the work of politics; governing, legislating, and opposing the Biden administration as best as they can. Winners build alliances, not enemies lists.

Of course, winners are necessarily tough. Personnel is policy, but sometimes so is personality. Trump was less of a fighter (and a less effective one) than the image he cultivated and projected, but he understood that Republican voters want leaders who care more about their good opinion than what the Washington Post editorial board thinks.

This is why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is having a political moment in the sun, and why Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota lost the trust of many voters when she caved to big business pressure on transgenderism. Conservatives need leaders who will work against the ruling class, not surrender to it.

These new leaders will win by developing and prioritizing policies that address the current needs of the nation, rather than the desires of the donor class. Political entrepreneurs succeed when existing institutions fail to adapt to new circumstances. Trump conquered the GOP because the public, starting with the Republican base, no longer bought what the party establishment was selling.

Thus, a successful post-Trump GOP will incorporate some of Trumps populist instincts. It will adjust its agenda to appeal to the working-class voters that Trump brought into the GOP, rather than just relying on these voters fleeing from the ever-more-woke Democratic Party. It will avoid treating minority voters as caricatures and appeal to their actual beliefs and interests. Finally, it will stop trying to sideline the social conservatives whose votes the party needs.

In short, successful GOP politicians will know who their voters (and potential voters) are and what concerns them; an obvious political approach that is surprisingly neglected. Yet they will also avoid needlessly picking fights with their voters, including over the former president. They will be willing to criticize Trump when necessary, but they will not be monomaniacs on the subject there is no need for them to denounce his every blog post.

The truth is that most Trump voters will acknowledge his flaws, but they get their hackles up at being berated for their votes. Doing so is self-indulgent and will only prolong Trumps power over the Republican Party. There is plenty of room in the Republican Party for those who could never stomach Trump, but there is no space for a small minority that is determined to somehow purge the majority.

Setting aside the grifters and attention-seekers, those who seriously engage in projects such as the Call for American Renewal are attempting to satisfy psychological, even quasi-religious, needs. They are, after all, not satisfied with Trump being out of office. Animated by bitterness, they want judgment on him and anyone who supported him.

This explains why they launch doomed efforts that only help Trump retain his hold on the GOP. The point is not to succeed, but to confirm their own righteousness compared to the unregenerate who refuse the call.

Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Dear GOP: Move On From Trump Without Repudiating His Voters - The Federalist

Apple willingly compromises certain privacy and security business practices to build a partnership with the Chinese government, a new report from the New York Times explains.

Not only does the Big Tech company store personal data of Chinese users on servers that are managed and serviced by a firm owned by the communist regime, but Apples CEO Tim Cook has spent years making frequent, statesmanlike visits and meeting with top leaders in the Asian country and caving to its wishes.

Apple often boasts that it believes privacy is a fundamental human right, but the companys relationship with China seems to discard that core value in exchange for doing Chinas bidding such as removing certain encryption technology and digital key that the communist regime disagreed with.

We have never compromised the security of our users or their data in China or anywhere we operate, the company said.

But in data centers similar to the one being built outside Guiyang, China, experts and Apple engineers warn, Apples compromises have made it nearly impossible for the company to stop the Chinese government from gaining access to the emails, photos, documents, contacts, and locations of millions of Chinese residents who they arent afraid to oppress.

The Chinese government also has a long list of human rights abuses including enslaving the Uyghurs, a minority group located in the Xijiang province, and squashing pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, but once again, Apple is unbothered. Despite offering a long creed promising a commitment to human rights causes, Apple has repeatedly bowed to the wishes of the communist regime to censor apps and blacklist people that government officials think could pose a danger to Xi Jinping or his rule.

Over the last few years, tens of thousands of apps containing content considered objectionable to the communist government were removed from the Chinese version of the app store. Some of the most notable disappearances were apps for worldwide news outlets, pro-democracy organizations, certain religious institutions and figures such as the Dalai Lama, and even apps that provided encryption or shortcuts to users who wanted more digital privacy and security.

After Chinese employees complained, it even dropped the Designed by Apple in California slogan from the backs of iPhones, the Times report says, noting the regimes unwillingness to let Apples branding remain American.

Cook has repeatedly tried to quiet criticism of Apples relationship with China by noting how efficient it makes the company. Not only does Apples partnership with the regime allow for access to, housing for, and factories for Chinese workers who assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad, and Mac to rake in at least $55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China, but it also gives the company an easy global reach.

Chinas power over Cook and the company, however, is quite evident. In addition to bending to the regimes will on censorship and privacy, Apple went out of its way to give data to the Chinese government, despite American laws prohibiting it, by giving legal ownership of user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang.

Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as an additional party, the Times says. Apple told customers the change was to improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations.

Apple did not respond to The Federalists request for comment.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Report: Apple Compromises Privacy And Security To Appease The CCP - The Federalist

The U.S Army announced it will begin prioritizing climate change considerations as part of its ongoing strategic operations and threat analysis, according to a newly released memo.

Titled, US Army: Addressing Climate Change Threats, the document classifies climate change as a serious threat to U.S. National security interests and defense objectives, while also detailing how the military agency intends to play a more active role in responding to climate-related issues moving forward.

To prepare for the challenges ahead, the Army will continue to identify and implement steps to enhance readiness and capability in the face of climate related threats and will continue to be a strong steward of the resources offered in the shared operational environment, the memo read. The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions.

As part of its response initiative, the agency intends to conduct in-depth assessments of likely climate change effects on the Armys worldwide missions, while also working to lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.

This response will also include an interagency focus on strategizing and planning to mitigate climate threats, with an emphasis placed on soldier resilience, energy reform, and capability enhancement and procurement.

The push to incorporate a left-wing, climate agenda under the guise of U.S. national security has long been a top priority for President Joe Biden since taking office. Last month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III foreshadowed how the Defense Department under the administration will utilize the issue of climate change to reshape how the military operates.

We in the Department of Defense are committed to doing our part, from increasing the energy efficiency of our platforms and installations to deploying clean distributed generation and energy storage, to electrifying our own vehicle fleets, he said. The benefits of action extend well beyond the climate, and include opportunities to improve our own operations.

Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student attending the University of Mary Washington.

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US Army Takes On Climate Change As 'Serious Threat' To National Security - The Federalist