Category Archives: Federalist

Last week, Reuters reported based on two anonymous sources that Amazon Web Services, which controls 40 percent of web hosting in the world, plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies.

Over the coming months, Amazon will hire a small group of people in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division to develop expertise and work with outside researchers to monitor for future threats, one of the sources familiar with the matter said. It could turn Amazon, the leading cloud service provider worldwide with 40% market share according to research firm Gartner, into one of the worlds most powerful arbiters of content allowed on the internet, experts say.

Amazon declined to comment to Reuters for the story, then after the article published sent a statement insisting the report was wrong, claiming, AWS Trust & Safety has no plans to change its policies or processes, and the team has always existed.'

Weve always reserved the right to police who is allowed to speak on our internet is not a very comforting response to an article alleging a coming content crackdown. In addition, to this post-publication claim from Amazon, A Reuters spokesperson said the news agency stands by its reporting.

Dont forget the context: The Biden administration revealed a few weeks ago that they, mafia-like, pressure big tech entities like Facebook and Twitter to remove information that contradicts their political goals. (Thats an, um, misinformed piece of content over there on your platform. Sure would be a shame if the super-touchy Democrats controlling the entire federal government decided it was a reason to regulate and legally harass you.)

The reported Amazon Web Services crackdown also comes in the wake of news that the Jan. 6 congressional committee subpoenaed the cell phone records of GOP lawmakers, including the House minority leader, from their service providers, which already help the federal government spy on Americans through routinely recording the contents of everyones texts and calls.

Dont forget, either, that leftist pressure on big tech companies is a big reason they are economically and socially persecuting the lefts enemies. As Glenn Greenwald notes, The extraordinary destruction of Parler in January by three Silicon Valley monopolies Apple, Google and Amazon occurred after leading Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) publicly demandedthe platforms removal from the internet. And Democratic-led Congressional committeescontinue to summon Silicon Valley executives to demand they impose greater degrees of political censorship against their political adversaries or else face legislative and regulatory reprisals.

Amazon is obviously not immune to any of this, and Jeff Bezos is ideological kin to those demanding their political opponents be shut out of their livelihoods, ability to speak publicly, and financial services. Thats why Amazon cut off Americas Frontline Doctors from web hosting, for another example, but hosts Netflix despite its promotion of child pornography and donates on users behalf to mass-murder machine Planned Parenthood. Their biases are clear.

Now, both Patreon and Substack reportedly use Amazon Web Services for hosting most of their data. These platforms bill themselves as a way for creators to be independent and cut out the middlemen. But when infrastructure services like web hosts and banks get political, it turns out these independent sites just replaced the middlemen with themselves.

Patreon has a history of allowing leftist politics to moderate its platform. Famously, Jordan Peterson and David Rubin left it in 2018 to create their own crowdfunding platform, Locals, after Patreon selectively banned a creator with evidence it was due to political animus. Patreon has continued that bias to the present day, most recently banning investigative journalists for not parroting shifting government claims about COVID-19.

Locals also uses Amazon Web Services, though, or did as of earlier this year, making them also vulnerable through their host to the kind of crackdown Peterson and Rubin created the site to repudiate. The big domain name and hosting outfit GoDaddy uses AWS servers, and has also repeatedly defenestrated people on the right, from gun sites to, just over the weekend, Texas Right to Life in the wake of that organizations successful push for a bill protecting unborn babies after their heartbeats are detectable.

On that note, who could possibly be Amazons outside researchers who determine what they host? Not independent factcheckers like those Facebook pays to give them cover for blocking politically incorrect ideas, right?

Or what about lucrative leftist smear machines like the Antifa affiliate-supporting and violence-inciting Southern Poverty Law Center, which already partners with Amazon to block mainstream Christian and conservative organizations from Amazon Smile? Or how about the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, which influences on a partisan basis whom PayPal will bank with? The prospects look pretty dim indeed.

If servers like AWS will shut you down, that inherently threatens the economic independence of anyone who dares have different ideas than their speech monitors and whose livelihood is in any way routed through the Internet and whose isnt? Even meatspace-focused jobs like farmers and plumbers have to have websites and email addresses. Unless they happen to have a storefront on a busy intersection, they have to have at least a Google Maps shingle up, so enough people can find their services to keep food on their tables.

There can be no personal independence, no entrepreneurship, no social creativity if youre not allowed to use the roads, the phones, the banks, or the internet unless you publicly burn pinches of incense to the leftist gods. In a world like that, we are all slaves to the pagan religion of leftism and, more importantly, its priests.

This entire dynamic is also another example of the build your own infrastructure asymmetric warfare the new left is deploying, with increasing depth and force, against their opponents. Its endpoint is clearly, as Federalist Senior Contributor Nathanael Blake observed to me in an email, build your own government.

Thats because American governments essentially control who is allowed to start businesses you need building permits, and to follow health code, and to offer certain benefits, and to file your taxes a certain way, and on and on and on, all of which are potential chokepoints for a militant bureaucrat motivated by a woke mob to squeeze.

Previously, these kinds of administrative functions were seen as neutral and available to all, but especially since the Obama years, these bureaucrats have unmasked themselves like never before as blatantly partisan actors. Remember Lois Lerner? So people who want to start competing and alternative infrastructure better as hell have political patrons all the way up the ladder, plus a big group of funders and lawyers, who will block for them.

In other words, today even building private infrastructure requires government permission, at some level, and typically at many. The massive size of our government and the multitudinous duties it has assumed have multiplied the pressure points that partisan activists can apply to anyone they see as their political enemy. Fixing this private infrastructure problem requires fixing the big-government problem that weaponizes it.

You wouldnt believe how many people come up to me and they say, Hey, Martin, you got to start a bank. And Im like, Well, what Ill do is Ill stand up a bunch of server infrastructure so that bank wont get pulled by the internet provider,' Right Forge CEO Martin Avila told The Daily Signal in June. And then were talking to people who are starting banks. Were talking people that are thinking about Stripe and how much power it has, or Square, like point of sales. And theres entrepreneurs that are just beelining to create solutions because they see the enormity of the market. And what RightForge can do is support those things where they wont be taken down.

And who is going to bat for RightForge if IRS bureaucrats decide its taxes need some extra scrutiny? Or if politically motivated hackers wage an attack? Or come up with your own speculation, because lets not give bad guys any ideas.

When Sen. Tom Cotton gets asked next time what he can do about cancel culture, he and every other Republican candidate should be able to whip out a list of painful legal and other penalties their legislative assistants have written up that will be applied to entities that abuse the public trust in any of these ways. Democrats got big business to be their lapdogs, not just because big business leaders are catechized in the leftist religion in college, but also because big business isnt afraid of Republicans but they are of Democrats.

That needs to change, or Republican voters will be increasingly banned from basic infrastructure and subjected to economic insecurity in America, based entirely on their politics. Even more than in 2016, that will have them pondering why in the blazes do they even come out to vote for such a freaking useless political party that has no idea what to do with power. People abandon leaders who dont bring home the bacon, and thats exactly what this issue is all about.

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The Amazon Web Crackdown Threatens Patreon, Substack, And You - The Federalist

(Watchthevideofor the monologue and an interview with WMAL and The Daily Callers Vince Coglianese on the how we can fix our foreign policy.)

The war in Afghanistan is finally at its end. It was a catastrophe and a mess a mess that some of us saw up close, a mess that some of us are still living through in Kabul and a mess that cost many lives.

Theres no nice way to say this, but somebody has to: There have been a lot of bad reactions on the right to the Afghan calamity. The great majority of these reactions are simply misguided, but some are flat-out stupid and a few are truly ghoulish.

What unites all of them is partisanship: The need to hit Democrats, and the Democratic Party, for being the enemy the reason everything is wrong.

That need is understandable: Its very difficult to resist that partisan urge when the Democratic Party has politicized everything in daily life, from your church to your bathroom, and from your distant ancestors to the skin color they handed down. But when we gaze out on the ruins of our foreign policy, on the wounded and maimed young men and women growing old around us and on the graves of the fallen we need to resist partisanship at all levels.

Why? Because this war this catastrophe implicates all parties in Washington.

It started under a Republican who ran as a non-interventionist; it was escalated by a Democrat who beat out Hillary Clinton in part by emphasizing his opposition to wasteful wars abroad. Both those presidents eventually ended up parroting the talking points of pompous, dishonest, and incompetent Ivy League politicians presented to the public as generals.

And if were honest, President Donald Trump ended up parroting many of those talking points as well. Hes parroting some of them right now.

Trump saw in 2016 how insane Americas endless wars are, but like so many 20th century Americans, great and small, he had a fatal love for the myth of the American general the Douglas MacArthur, the George S. Patton, the Ulysses S. Grant never realizing that those men are long gone.

Now, in the last chapter of this 20-year book, a Democrat has forced through a sloppy exit. It was uglier than it needed to be, but it was, mercifully, an end. Now the rush is on to blame him for the entire thing, but we cant fall for that.

Youve likely been told about a lot of controversies things that at first glance fill any American with rage. Some are true, like the surrendering of Bagram, but others, like so much of this war, are missing crucial context.

One example is the list of Americans and green-card holders we handed to the Taliban. That was infuriating, right? Why would we give them such a list? But to quote everyones least favorite Democrat, what difference did it make?

The answer is basically none because the Taliban controlled the perimeter of the airport like a nightmare version of the TSA, if there is such a thing. In order to get through that perimeter, American persons needed to show their green card or their American passport. No one else was getting through those lines, and the Taliban were checking the list for us.

Does that sound bad? It is; but it is not made worse by us giving them a cross-reference.

And guess what: They had the information already. They knew who was in country at least as well as the Afghan government knew and at least as well as the seriously imperfect State Department had communicated to them because the Taliban had the Afghan government, computers, personnel, and all. At that point, they were (and still are) the Afghan government, so sadly, as one American whos evacuated dozens of American persons told The Federalist, the list wasnt Secret-Squirrel stuff.

But now its the worlds biggest hostage situation! Unfortunately, it already was. That ship had sailed; that train had left the station. That government you sacrificed a trillion dollars and 2,300 of your finest fellow citizens propping up? That government fled the country carrying $169 million in cash. (At least they thought to bring their toys with them.)

It was the Talibans country, and that gave them power. That is the sad truth about defeat the bitter reality of losing a war. But its better to accept the truth than cause even more harm through denial and misdirected outrage.

All of this was known; all of this had been reported. A lot of people are just angry or misdirected, but some people are lying to you about what happened. Theyre lying because they want President Joe Biden to take all the blame for a disaster they did just as much to create. Theyre lying because even now, they want to restart a war America was never going to win.

But not everyone is lying. Some mean well. This is a hard one, because any one of us can fall prey to poisonous thoughts if we arent vigilant.

Allow me to start with an example. There are a lot of flags in my neighborhood: American flags, Nationals baseball team flags; theres a Lannister flag from Game of Thrones, a few for foreign soccer teams, and one Gov. Ron DeSantis flag (which I love).

More than any of these, there are a lot of rainbow flags a pennant that keeps getting stranger and stranger. Right now its a Black Lives Matter transgender rainbow, and a few really avant garde ones have a symbol for prostitutes too. Its annoying, but fine its a slice of America.

One day I asked a neighbor, What do you think about me flying the Vatican flag in June, our only month specifically devoted to a cardinal sin?

She replied that she thought I ought to fly that flag from time to time and that most people probably wouldnt recognize it, but before I do anything ask myself, Where is this coming from? Am I flying our flag out of a Christian spirit? Out of love? Or is it to troll my neighbor?

I had to think about that. I love the Catholic Church; I love her coat of arms the triple crown and Peters keys to the kingdom; I think it should be represented in Washington; but was that why I was suggesting this?It was a hard question to ask myself. It took looking inward and I didnt like every answer I found.

Heres the point: There have been a lot of memorials to our honored dead. They deserve it they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old and we must ensure that they are not forgotten.

In the last couple weeks, a lot of people put up 13 flags in their yard. It was lovely to see; God bless those men and women. But so help us God, make sure we do this with goodness and with love in our hearts. Did you put out flags when Americans died under Presidents Trump and Bush?

Its not an inconsequential question: its an important one. During the peak of COVID, by RFK stadium (where a good number of people drive by entering Capitol Hill), a city-owned green space was filled with American flags and a counter was put up to number the dead attributed to COVID-19. Was this done to honor Americans who had passed?

We got our answer when they took it down after the election. The answer was no the people who erected this [quote] monument were ghouls, feigning grief for the dead in order to serve based political ends. It reminded me of my old hometown left-wing newspaper, which would print the names and faces of our war dead under President George W. Bush but dropped the practice not long after he left office.

When we put up flags to honor the dead, we must always ask ourselves why this tragedy is different and what it means to us and we have to pray on that. We need to always think deeply when we remember them or we do them no service.

Since the deadly attack on Kabul airport, weve been flooded with pictures and videos of grieving parents whose young children were killed like so many others in that Godforsaken country. Immediately, and over and over again, Ive heard good people I know planning political ads around these messages ads designed to hurt their political opponents, and help their political friends.

Its gruesome, and Ive told them that. There might be a place for it, but search yourselves: Do we honor their memory in this way? Its an honest question and there are different right answers but if you think we do so by just throwing out the ruling party and electing the one we like better, Ive got 20 years of failure to show you.

America will only survive by being an actual country. Its history, its traditions, its institutions, and its heroes cant simply be the squabbling ground for political factions. Thats one reason the War in Afghanistan dragged on so disastrously for so long: Many people knew it was a sham and a mess, but very few people wanted to take the political hit for ending it.

Dont let the awful end of our latest war just be another political news cycle proving that this party is smart and good and the other is stupid and bad. Turn it in a positive direction: Demand better policies, better priorities, and better people from both parties going forward. Dont see this as a way to win the next election see it as a way to have a better country 10, 20, 100 years from now.

Do we want to honor those brave men and women who laid down their lives, or who came home bearing the scars of that war, both physical and mental? We all know some of those people. Theyre having a very difficult time right now.

Its a hard time for this country. If we want to honor them if we want to show them their sacrifice was worth a solitary damn to us well do this right.

This is our chance to right Americas twisted foreign policy. We cant miss it.

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Afghanistan Was A Bipartisan Disaster, And We Must React Accordingly - The Federalist

A Portland State University philosophy professor is resigning from his position after the university Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology.

In a scathing letter to the universitys Provost Susan Jeffords disseminated through Bari Weisss substack, Peter Boghossian explained that the academic institutions unwillingness to accept free thinking is harming education.

Boghossian first joined PSU more than 10 years ago. During his time teaching, Boghossian explained that he often invited guest speakers to campus not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didnt.

From those messy and difficult conversations, Ive seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds, he wrote. I never once believednor do I now that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

Over the years, however, Boghossian said that the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible and transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicatedthe universitys truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense wherestudents are now afraid to speak openly and honestly, he continued.

Under the guise of fighting off microaggressions and bigotry on campus, the professor said PSU systemically sacrificed free-thinking and dialogue. When he called attention to the incidents of illiberalism and began asking the administration hard questions about their lurch toward homogenous thinking, Boghossian was met with retaliation and an investigation into whether he was beating my wife and children.

The universitys investigation found nothing to back up the claim, but the professor said there was no apology for the false accusations. Instead, Boghossian was told he was not allowed to render my opinion about protected classes or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges.

Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations, he warned. I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers no matter how absurd could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.

Boghossians attempts to draw attention to this phenomenon through an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy were only met with more vandalism and physical pushback from students and the university without any consequences.

Shortly thereafter,swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators, the professor wrote.

Boghossian said this series of events pushed him to realize that every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, beeninitially condemned.

Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas, Boghossian concluded. This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didnt?

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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Portland Professor Resigns After University 'Sacrificed Ideas For Ideology' - The Federalist

The Biden administration bowed to the nations largest teachers union and changed its masking guidance for schools in May, newly discovered emails from Americans for Public Trust indicate.

One day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on May 13 that fully vaccinated people did not have to wear masks, the National Education Association threatened the White House with a scathing letter demanding an explanation.

The NEAs first draft of the letter demanding clarification on masking complained that the CDC releasing the guidance without accompanying school-related updates creates confusion and fuels the internal politicization of this basic health and safety issue.

CDC has consistently said, and studies support, that mitigation measures, including to protect the most vulnerable, remain necessary in schools and institutions of higher education particularly because no elementary or middle school students, and few high school students, have been vaccinated, the draft continued. This will also make it hard for school boards and leaders of institutions of higher education to do the right thing by maintaining mitigation measures. We need CDC clarification right away.

After corresponding with the White Houses director of labor engagement Erika Dinkel-Smith, who orchestrated a phone call between CDC DirectorRochelle Walensky and the NEAs President Becky Pringle, the teachers union released a toned-down version of their original statement to the public and the corporate media who, according to the emails, were targeting the union for a response to the guidance change.

CDCs new guidance on vaccinated people highlights again the critical importance of everyone, including all students who are now eligible, getting vaccinated as quickly as possible, the new statement from Pringle said. CDCs current recommendation that schools continue to implement existing school-related guidance, including the mandatory and correct use of wearing masks and continuing of social distancing, is an important and welcome clarification about the protections that need to be in place in our schools.

All schools teaching students from kindergarten through grade 12 should continue to implement proper mask-wearing and distancing at least through the end of the 2020-21 school year, she added. These key mitigation measures for safe in-person instruction should remain in place in schools and institutions of higher education to protect all students and others who are not vaccinated.

One day later, the CDC changed its guidance to recommend universal masking in schools regardless of whether teachers, staff, and eligible students were vaccinated or not.

This batch of emails came just weeks after we already exposed the teachers unions influenced the CDC on school openings, Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News. Lo and behold, less than two weeks later, theyre at it again, but this time in relation to mask guidance.

The administration later fully reversed its initial guidance, recommending everyone (not just students) wear masks regardless of vaccination status, after modifying it to accommodate the teachers unions agenda.

Earlier this year, CDCDirectorRochelle Walensky publiclyadmitted that the agencys new school reopening guidelines were informed by the opinions of anti-in-person-learning teachers unions. This input from some of the same people who have stalled school reopenings in cities across the nation, Walensky said, resulted in direct changes to the guidance.

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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Emails: Biden CDC Caved To Teachers Union Pressure To Mask Students - The Federalist

While in an exile that lasted until his death, the poet Dante Alighieri wrote an epic that changed the world. It deals with timeless themes: hopelessness, struggle, heaven and hell, morality, pilgrimage, ignorance, and hope. Seven hundred years later, people are still reading his work. What an amazing legacy.

The 700th anniversary of Dantes death is this Sept. 14. To celebrate this septcentennial, a coalition of college professors have put together what they hope will be the worlds largest Dante reading group. To make broad involvement possible, the 100 Days of Dante project is stretching the 100 days of reading from Sept. 8, 2021 to Easter 2022, scheduling three cantos per week. Churches, schools, individuals, and book clubs all over the world are joining in.

To help people of all abilities and backgrounds participate, the project will send, via email and podcast, each canto on the appropriate day, plus an accompanying explanatory video. It is also providing supplemental materials such as discussions, further reading, and explanatory notes. Participants will have read Dantes entire Comedy by the end, as the work is comprised of 100 cantos.

Here is an introductory discussion about the program from several participating professors that I found helpful and whetted my appetite for the project.

I read large selections of The Divine Comedy in college English and have tried multiple times since then to read the entire trilogy Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso but so far have failed. Its a big, complex, weird work. This is my chance to try again with what in education jargon is called scaffolding: with help and hand-holding from people with more knowledge and experience.

For me, its not just a matter of filling in a major blank in my classics education, emailed a friend who is participating through a reading group at her church. Its about getting spiritual sustenance in these dark times!

100 Days of Dante is put on by Baylor University Honors College, in conjunction with the University of Dallas, Gonzaga University, Torrey Honors College at Biola University, Templeton Honors College at Eastern University, and Whitworth University. Anthony Nussmeier, who is involved on behalf of the Univerity of Dallas as the head of its Italian program, told Aleteia, We really want to emphasize the idea of the poem as a Christian epic, one that is informed by Christianity and one that can inform Christians with its wisdom, even in 2021.

Nussmeier noted the project is a great fit for anyone who might be interested in the intellectual underpinnings of western Christianity. Not just western Christianity, either, but the Western literary tradition. Dantes poem famously reveres the ancient Roman poet Virgil as Dantes guide on his pilgrimage. Virgil, of course, is the poet who composed the famous Aeneid.

Dantes epic reflected, incorporated, and pushed Virgils work forward in a Christian context, in a crowning example of the Western traditions fusion between Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. The Divine Comedy was in turn highly influential on later authors and thinkers, from Geoffrey Chaucer to John Milton to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

It also features the use of the poets vernacular for great works instead of Latin. Dante was a highly educated Latin scholar, yet he purposely chose to write in Italian. This has been of particular importance historically to authors keen on expressing and embodying their nations identity and cultural development, all the way up to Americans like Nathanael Hawthorne and Mark Twain many centuries later.

The Divine Comedy is a work of exile, of confusion, despair, and disorientation. It is about how Dante makes sense of his exile and confusion through a vision of the transcendent. I dont know about you, but that sounds timely to me right now.

Its a text that has something truly for everyone, in every discipline, Baylor University professor Matthew L. Anderson, the projects originator, told Aleteia. Its a masterpiece, and we really want people to gain some wisdom about their own lives, about the times we live in, from this ancient text, and for them to experience how a text like this can really shape and change how they see the world.

You can sign up to participate through the thrice-weekly emails and videos all free at 100DaysOfDante.com. If you wish to buy a translation in hard copy to follow along, Anthony Esolens fresh translation is highly acclaimed. You can preorder that trilogy here (its sold out until October). Im going to buy myself my copies later as a reward for keeping up with the project.

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To Celebrate 700 Years Of Dante, Read With Thousands Across The World - The Federalist

Over the weekend, the magazine Rolling Stone published an article with a shocking claim: a hospital in Oklahoma was so overwhelmed with patients injured from self-treating cases of COVID-19 with the horse dewormer ivermectin that gunshot victims were having to wait for emergency treatment. A photo paired with the article showed a line of people waiting, presumably, for entrance to the overrun hospital.

The article quickly made the roundsamong the corporate press and lefty pundits. Rachel Maddows official Twitter account, with 10.5 million followers, blasted out an interview with Dr. Jason McElyea discussing the issue, which was the basis for Rolling Stones coverage.

The problem? As with so much of the hysteria media spin these days, the story, the headline, and the photo were all, frankly, BS. The entire story was based around the claim of a single source: Dr. Jason McElyea, who, it turned out, hadnt worked at the hospital for two months.

The magazine issued a correction, which, in a sane world, would have been a full retraction. The update included a statement from Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah, a regional healthcare provider in Oklahoma:

UPDATE: Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah issued a statement: Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our communitys support.

So, in summary: the whole story was fake, the community was needlessly terrified, a good portion of the country was led to believe that stupid people (e.g.: Republicans) were ingesting horse dewormer (e.g.: awidely prescribed antiparasitic; the doctors who pioneered its use to treat parasitic infections in humans wereawarded a Nobel Prize in 2015), and the hospital had to waste resources responding to a manufactured PR storm.

Meanwhile, crisis actors in the corporate press contributed to the hysteria, uncritically sharing a story with a claim so facially outrageous and thinly sourced that it should never have made it to print.

If only this situation was a rare occurrence. But this type of mistake-riddled, advocacy pushing error is a feature of the corporate press: they insisted for years that Trump was compromised by Russia, that COVID-19 can be spread in schools and grocery stores but not in massive protests, that last summers riots that resulted in as much as $2 billion worth of damageand up to25 deathswere mostly peaceful.

Just last week, USA Todays fact-checkers, whose work product is used by Facebook and other social media companies as the basis for banning users for spreading misinformation, fell all over themselves to say Joe Biden wasnt checking his watch during the transfer ceremony for the bodies of 13 US service members killed in the recent terrorist attack in Kabul. But the reality mugging was even too much for USA Today to spin. The paper was forced to issue a throat-clearing retraction.

Journalists and fact-checkers are human,wrotethe posts author, Daniel Funke. We make mistakes. When we do, we correct them and try to make it right.

Perhaps, but this is hardly a consistent standard, and even then, one rarely applied. And the same press that demands grace for itself never, ever bestows it on the rest of us. Rest In Peace all of the social media accounts who have run afoul of corporate fact checks, only to later have their misinformation be proven correct.

We live in a world where the corporate press doesnt care about running down facts, presenting a well-sourced story, or even one with any context. These ivy-league journalism school grads care about one thing: using their platform as an advocacy tool for their ideological goals. And its become abundantly clear that they dont care how stupid they look putting forward stories controlled by confirmation bias, and are completely unashamed when their hypocrisy is pointed out to them. Because they know that no professional or financial consequence is coming just more backslapping, promotions, and awards from the countrys sneering smart set.

Rachel Bovard is The Federalist's senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

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Corrupt Corporate Media Spreads Disinformation On Ivermectin Patients Overwhelming Hospital - The Federalist

On the pandemic as a 2020 election issue, Joe Biden was the medias preferred candidate for president, not so much because he screamed confidence that he could stop people from dying. (He was literally underground for most of his public appearances.) But because he properly showed that he cared people were dying.

He had a soft voice and manner that soothed cable news anchors and brought comfort to reporters who find no greater arousal than in a man who cries in public.

The trick has earned Biden a lot of stock with the media, which then assured the public that he is the staid, competent leader this country needed after four years of Donald Trump.

He tried it again Thursday during a highly anticipated press conference to address the ISIS suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, that left 13 U.S. service members dead and more than a dozen others injured.

They were part of the bravest, most capable, and the most selfless military on the face of the Earth, Biden said. And they were part of, simply, what I call the backbone of America. Theyre the spine of America, the best the country has to offer. Jill and I our hearts ache, like Im sure all of you do as well, for all those Afghan families who have lost loved ones, including small children, or been wounded in this vicious attack. And were outraged as well as heartbroken.

Later in the conference, Biden bowed his head in what I assume was anguish or maybe frustration while a reporter asked him about his responsibility in the fallout.

The problem with the performance, though, is that the dead didnt lose their lives because of a freak virus that the entire world is grappling with. They died because under Bidens command, our military did not secure the perimeter of the Kabul airport that Americans are using to exit. And it has been under his command that the administration is scurrying against the clock to evacuate as many Americans as possible, lest we further tick off the new Taliban government that Biden has allowed to call the shots.

Biden and Jills hearts can ache 1,000 times over but this is his fault, and putting that tried and true empathy on display doesnt change anything.

The very quality that the media used to assist in Bidens election has us where we are right now. Since Inauguration Day, 200,000 people have died of the coronavirus with infections continuing to surge; a wave of just under 1 million new migrants have crushed the border; and now at least 13 Americans are dead, not while fighting a war, but while trying to leave one.

Empathy was nice for getting Biden into the White House. It hasnt been much use since.

Continued here:

This Is Where Joe Biden's Great Empathy Has Landed Us: 13 US - The Federalist

Interested to know what the top liberal legal minds of the United States Supreme Court think about government power and your private property? First, take 10 minutes to read Justice Brett Kavanaughs opinion, written for the majority, in the courts Thursday night decision to stop the ban on rental income; then spend another 10 minutes on Justice Stephen Breyers dissent.

Heres a hint: The left thinks its power is so overarching as to impact nearly every citizen, so broadly interpreted as to be essentially limitless, and so singularly vested as to be checked virtually solely at the discretion of the bureaucracy itself.

The absurdity begins in the opening paragraph of Breyers dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor. There, he lauds what he describes as the governments limited and judicious use of its power, writing, the [Centers for Disease Control]s current order is substantially more tailored than its prior eviction moratorium, which automatically applied nationwide.

Therefore, he reasons, theres no reason to even consider if the CDC has any authority on the matter.

How tailored is it, though? He gets to that two paragraphs later, when he cites the number of American counties the order applies to: Ninety percent; the vast majority of the country. This, he openly admits, is the lefts idea of substantially more tailored; its right there in the open.

So where does this tailored power come from, exactly? According to the CDC, it comes from the Public Health Service Act, a law Congress passed in 1944 to handle outbreaks of serious disease. It reads:

The Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

Whats that got to do with banning property owners from doing business with renters? To forbid them from ejecting squatters from their land? As written, not much at all: Every one of these powers is specific to, as Kavanaugh writes, identifying, isolating, and destroying the disease itself.

But according to Breyer, the Public Health Act essentially says we can kill your dog in a plague, so we also have the power to say you dont have to work during COVID a broad interpretation of congressionally authorized power at best.

How does he get there? Simple: the part of the law that grants the surgeon general the power to enact other measures, as in his judgment might be necessary.

Or, by not specifically naming every single means of identifying, isolating, and destroying COVID, Congress gave the CDC limitless authority to do as it pleases. If Congress, Breyer assures us, had meant to exclude these types of measures from its broad grant of authority, it likely would have said so.

Compare that reasoning with Kavanaughs, who maintains the court expects Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers.

The latter is the kind of reading that fits more soundly with, say, the 10th Amendment. written by men who had seen abuse of power, and hoped to curtail it. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, it reads, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In fact, this is clear in recent Supreme Court precedent. Our precedents, the court wrote in 2020, require Congress to enact exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the power of the Government over private property.

A tenants relationship with his landlord falls under state law completely; thats the reason, for example, you dont hear about government rent-control outside of a number of cities in New York, Maryland, New Jersey, or California.

Congress, of course, could change this, as the 2020 decision notes, and for a while they did: thats where the ban on moratorium came from in the first place.

So what happened? The congressional moratorium expired on Dec. 31.

But couldnt Congress just extend it if they wanted to? Yes, and under Biden they did, adding one more month in the second COVID stimulus; and then they declined to extend it further.

So why is still going on? Because the CDC decided it didnt need Congress anyway, extending the moratorium on its own apparent authority through March, then through June, then through July, and all the way to Thursday night, when Kavanaugh joined Justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett in putting a stop to it.

That decision down didnt come quickly, either. In June, Kavanaugh joined the other side, staying the courts hand in order to, he reasoned, allow long-appropriated government funds to go toward relief. Thats all the time it would need, the CDC insisted; but they lied, and here we are.

None of that matters, Breyer claims, because this is an emergency, and by going to work, people put themselves at risk of dying. Nevermind that nurses, grocery clerks, flight attendants, bartenders, police officers, construction workers, cab drivers, soldiers, cooks, trash collectors, cameramen, janitors, plumbers, warehouse employees, bouncers, pilots, firemen, musicians, engineers, and a whole host of others have long been back at work. Nevermind that the United States economy needs workers so badly some businesses are going under for lack of them. Just look at the charts!

Breyer is so convinced of this, he openly admits that backlogged government funds and renters refusing to pay rent is an injury, but claims the court has to compare that injury with the irreparable harm of eviction.

What irreparable harm, exactly? Only the chart is offered. Breyer completely neglects to even try to explain how evictions are more dangerous than the masses of Americans freely moving out of New York, California, Oregon, D.C., and other COVID-obsessed areas, or going about their day to day business, but in his thinking, he doesnt need to: The CDC is not to be questioned on law or constitutional authority by any court in this land.

The public interest, he writes, is not favored by the spread of disease or a courts second-guessing of the CDCs judgment.

Fortunately, his colleagues in the majority disagree: It is indisputable, Kavanaugh writes in his conclusion, that the public has a strong interest in combating the spread of the COVID19 Delta variant.But our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.

It is up to Congress, not the CDC, to decide whether the public interest merits further action here.

And thats where the split is: Breyer and his political allies on the left and throughout the Democrat Party have unfailing faith in the technocracy; its near-religious, and were all living in it.

For the past 18 months, weve suffered under the thumb of this sort of unchecked bureaucracy: Closed schools, masked children, shuttered businesses, canceled weddings, restricted hospitals, forbidden funerals even the public drug dens and homeless camps now filling major cities are products of CDC guidance. For public health and safety, were told.

But while its been in full public view these past 18 months, the reality is we have increasingly suffered under the thumb of unchecked bureaucracy since President Woodrow Wilson; its power and influence growing stronger each year, while the executive and congressional power and will to curb it have lessened.

Some of that growth is natural: influence craves influence, power craves power. But much of it is the result either of active policies in favor of it (or a failure to enact policies restricting it), driven by men like Wilson and men like Breyer highly educated and seriously intelligent men who think that we, the people, ought not rule ourselves; the experts will take care of that.

Read more from the original source:

Latest SCOTUS Dissent Is A Window Into The COVID Bureaucracy's Mind - The Federalist

Former President Donald Trump rejected President Joe Bidens attempts to blame him for the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and American lives lost due to the chaos in Kabul.

While Biden continues to point the finger at Trump for negotiating with the Taliban, the former president said the agreement his administration orchestrated was clear about consequences.

We had a very strong agreement. It was conditions-based. Now there were many other parts of the agreement also. And if they violated them, you know that, we went in and bombed the hell out of them, and they never would. They never would have come into Kabul. And they just wouldnt do it, Trump said on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Now what happened is one day, Biden said take the soldiers out. And it went back to the leaders of the Taliban, to the whole group of them, that the soldiers are leaving. And I would say that they were shocked, okay? I am surmising that they were shocked, because we had that thing so tight.

He also noted that we would not have stood for any soldiers or any Americans being killed or shot at or hurt in any way.

That was in there. And Hugh, for 18 months, not one American soldier was killed. Not one. Eighteen months. And that was because of the agreement, and because of my talk with Abdul, who is now the boss, as you know, He is now the boss, Trump said.

When asked what do you make about his availability to the press, Trump said he doesnt think Biden knows what is going on.

I dont think he knows whats happening. And its frankly a horrible thing thats going on. I think its the most embarrassing moment for our military and for our country. Ive never seen anything like it. Ive never seen, it just doesnt make sense, Trump said. How theyre doing it, what theyre doing, we had it in perfect shape. Just like we had the southern border in perfect shape, and then he destroyed it. We had the fewest number of people coming in. Now, we have the most number of people, and drugs and other things coming in. We had that in the best shape in the history of our country. And now, for this long period of this war, this horrible 21-year war, we had it in such good shape to get out, and get out with pride, get out with, really, a moral victory. And for some reason, it doesnt make sense, he pulled the military out first.

Trump also said he didnt have faith that the rest of the administration was fully tuned into the situation either.

We could have thousands of hostages. I dont think they know what theyre doing. Yesterday, they said 500. So the 35,000 all of sudden is 500, and yet most of the people taken on the plane, most of those people, as you know, are Afghans, right? Trump asked. So how are we down to 500? Nobody knows what the number of hostages is. I dont think the United States has a clue. I think there are thousands of people that are hostage.

In addition to promising he wouldve had a plan to evacuate civilians, allies, and Afghan interpreters, as well as military equipment (against the wishes of woke generals like current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley) before fully withdrawing troops, Trump said he made it very clear to the Taliban in their conversations that they shouldnt mess with the United States.

And even the introduction, I say hello, and he screamed something very tough. And I then started with him. I said listen, before we start the longtime conversation and conversations that were going to have, I have to say one thing, and Ill never have to say it again to you. And heres what I say. If you do anything bad to the United States of America, if you do anything bad to any of our civilians, to any American citizen, or if you do anything out of the normal, you know, theyve been fighting for 1,000 years, but out of the normal, because youve had your wars, and if you do anything out of the normal, but anything bad to America or any American citizens, I will hit you harder than anybody has ever been hit in world history. You will be hit harder than any country and any person has ever been hit in world history, Trump said. And we will start with the exact location and the exact town, and its right here. And I believe I repeated the name of his town. That will be the first place that we start. And I wont be able to speak to you anymore after that, and isnt that a very sad thing? But that is the story.

Trump also said he followed through on his threat when the Taliban missed conditions.

I wanted to be out by May 1st. I had spoken to him quite a bit before May 1st, but we had a condition of May 1st. But they missed conditions, and so therefore, I bombed and we hit them very hard. And then we said we will agree to those conditions. I said no, youve already agreed to them. Dont play games. We had them so good. They werent in Kabul, Trump said.

You take a look at when they started taking over Afghanistan. Its when I left. When I left, thats when it started, they started going wild, because they were dealing with another president, he added. And I never realized, and of course I realized the importance and power of the presidency, but I never realized how important the office of the president is until this happened, because when I watched what happened over the last week and a half with some horrible, stupid decisions that were made, number one being allowing our military to leave before the civilians and before we get all of our equipment back, $83 billion.

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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Trump Rejects Biden's Blame For Taliban Takeover: 'We Would've Bombed The Hell Out Of Them - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, President of Americans for Prosperity Tim Phillips joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to break down how Democrats are using the taxpayer-funded infrastructure and reconciliation bills to push their leftist, progressive agendas.

In the next four months, what can the left do to move our nation further down the road, fastest toward their vision, their goal? Phillips asked. Its not Afghanistan, its not the [critical race theory] battle, its not any cultural battle in the next four months. Its pass the three and a half-trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, jam it as full of regulations and provisions that basically bring in the Green New Deal, and the socialized medicine, and Medicare-For-All, and also elements of this union PRO Act, get that passed and signed by Biden and you literally have a third inflection point from the left to follow up on the Great Society of the 1960s.

While Phillips noted bad policy normally is also bad politics in regards to some Republicans willingness to support the infrastructure deal, he believes there are some things the GOP must seek out as common ground to bring people in.

I see the anger and the frustration and its legitimate and real. Its not the final vehicle to winning the country for our beliefs and principles and hopes and aspirations. To do that, weve got to turn outward and woo people to us, bring people to us, Phillips said. Weve got a country to win. And again, the way we do it is not by subtraction well, that person is not pure enough, this group needs to be kicked out. We do it by multiplication.

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Should Conservatives Care About Spending As The Culture Is Crumbling? - The Federalist