Cross-Examination

• Jordan drops a censorship bombshell: In a 103-page interim report, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan, revealed that the Department of Homeland Security helped create a “disinformation” group at Stanford University prior to the 2020 election. The group, laughably dubbed the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), colluded with DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Big Tech companies to suppress and censor online speech. The report contains a number of correspondences between members of the EIP and CISA, showing how “the federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions.” The report described the EIP as a “consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.” What this latest bombshell report demonstrates is the degree to which Washington has been involved in censoring and controlling Americans’ online speech. That’s a blatant violation of their First Amendment rights.

• Media downplays the killing of a Jew in California: Perhaps Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats were too busy rooting out “Islamic-phobia” to notice, but a 69-year-old Jewish man was pogromed to death following an “altercation” with a pro-Palestinian thug at a Sunday afternoon rally in the LA suburb of Thousand Oaks. As Fox News reports, Paul Kessler got into a “physical altercation” during which he “fell backwards and struck his head on the ground,” the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that added the medical examiner’s office “determined the cause of death to be blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide.” Homicide indeed. But get a load of this mealy-mouth, passive-voice, politically correct headline from NBC News: “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.” What would we do without “officials”? Did Kessler hit himself in the head? Did he bump into a light pole? The headline doesn’t say. As it turns out, he was smashed in the head with a megaphone by an as-yet unnamed 50-year-old assailant. And we wonder: Had the roles been reversed and a pro-Israel protester had offed a pro-Palestine protester, would the media be hiding the identity of the killer? We suspect not.

• House censures Tlaib: Who says there’s no bipartisanship in DC these days? By a vote of 234-188, with four members voting present, the House of Representatives voted to censure pro-Hamas Detroit Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, she of the teary-eyed claim that her reckless and hate-filled anti-Israel rhetoric “has always been of the Israeli government and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s actions.” The members weren’t buying it. “When she chants ‘From the river to the sea,’ she believes it! She believes Israel should be eradicated!” thundered New York Republican Mike Lawler, referring to the vile language that comes straight out of the Hamas charter. “Anyone who supports this or refuses to condemn it has no place in the United States Congress,” said New Jersey Republican (and former Democrat) Jeff Van Drew. But while we appreciate the congressman’s sentiment, we’d remind him that there’s an important matter of free speech at stake here that ought not be steamrolled. Free speech, after all, isn’t about being able to say the things that are popular; it’s about being able to say the things that are idiotic or offensive. In a free country, people should be free to make fools of themselves, and free to out themselves as bigots. That’s what free speech is really about. And that’s why rock-ribbed Kentucky conservative Thomas Massie and a tiny handful of Republicans voted against censuring this Jew hater.

• KJP refuses to condemn tearing down of hostage posters: “Look, I — I’ve sorta, kinda seen the reporting here and there. I think it was from last week. … I’m just not going to go into specifics on that particular thing.” So stammered Joe Biden’s dumb and disgraceful press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who became paralyzed when one of her press-pool trucklings decided to ask her a good question yesterday: “A lot of videos of individuals who have been tearing down signs,” began NBC News’s Peter Alexander, “many of these taking place in New York City, of Israelis presently being held hostage in Gaza. There have been some tense confrontations that have taken place there. Is the White House’s view that these actions should be condemned, the pulling of the pulling down of them, or that that’s a form of peaceful protest?” It’s a simple question, really, and the answer should’ve been equally simple: You condemn the tearing down of those posters not only as an affront to free speech but as an assault on fundamental decency. Alas, shortly afterward, KJP was told to clean up her own mess via X. “As a result of the Hamas terrorist attacks,” she posted, “communities and families are grieving. For the past month, the families of those who have been taken hostage have lived in agony. Tearing down pictures of their loved ones — who are being held hostage by Hamas — is wrong and hurtful.” What would Democrats do without do-overs?

• Antarctic cooling: This past summer, much of the mainstream media promoted climate alarmism with headlines like The Washington Post’s “This was the world’s hottest summer on record ‘by a large margin.’” Furthermore, climate alarmists have been constantly warning of an apocalyptic catastrophe if the global temperature warms by another 1ºC or 2ºC. Yet time and again, climate data fails to affirm and often debunks the climate model-generated projections. Case in point, a recent study of temperature data collected from Antarctica found that from 1999 to 2018, the continent’s annual mean surface temperature has cooled by over 1.8ºC. This data runs directly counter to 28 of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) models, none of which had captured a cooling trend. So, how is it that Antarctica has been cooling despite the fact that global carbon emissions have increased over that same time span? Could it be that man-caused carbon emissions aren’t the primary driver of global temperatures?

• GOP AGs sue FDA vis-à-vis abortion pills: State attorneys general from Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri on Monday filed a joint lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration alleging that the agency never had the legal right to approve abortion pills back in 2000. The abortion drugs in question are mifepristone and misoprostol. Furthermore, the suit challenges the FDA’s 2016 decision to downgrade safety restrictions for the drugs, its 2019 approval of a generic version of the drugs, and its 2021 decision to allow the drugs to be dispensed through the mail. The lawsuit observes that “sex traffickers and sexual abusers [often] force their victims to get abortions,” and they haven taken advantage of the FDA’s actions. Noting that the primary responsibility of the FDA is “to protect the health, safety, and welfare of all Americans by rejecting or limiting the use of drugs dangerous to the public,” the AGs contend that the agency “has failed in this responsibility.” They add: “Specifically, it failed America’s women and girls when it chose politics over science and approved risky, untested chemical abortion drugs for use in the United States. And it has continued to fail them by turning a blind eye to these harms and repeatedly removing even the most basic precautionary requirements associated with the use of these risking drugs.”

• Military personnel data at risk: As if serving in Joe Biden’s woke military weren’t depressing enough, it turns out that our warriors are also at risk of having their identities stolen. As MIT Technology Review reports, “For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about active-duty military members and veterans, including their names, home addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions.” Researchers at Duke University, where the study was conducted, “approached 12 data brokers in the US and asked what would be necessary to buy this kind of information.” The answer: Not much of anything. “They ultimately purchased thousands of records about American service members, finding that many brokers offered to sell the data with minimal vetting and were willing to deal with buyers using email domains based in both the US and Asia.” If we want to address our military’s unreadiness under Joe Biden, and the national security risk of our stubborn recruiting shortfall, we might start with such fundamental assurances that their personal information won’t be sold by money-grubbing data brokers.

• Covenant School killer’s leaked writings authenticated: The leaked “manifesto” of the perpetrator who attacked and murdered three children and three staff at The Covenant School in Nashville earlier this year has been authenticated. On Tuesday, Nashville Police Chief John Drake confirmed that the images of documents leaked to conservative commentator Steven Crowder were genuine. Controversy has surrounded the female perpetrator’s so-called manifesto after law enforcement and governmental authorities took the unusual step of refusing to release its content to the public. That all erupted again following the leak, as its contents not only revealed the perpetrator’s racist anti-white motivations, but more so because of the government authorities’ response to its leak, as Drake announced an investigation into finding who was responsible for leaking to the media. While many had surmised that the perpetrator’s self-expressed “transgender” identity was the motive behind her murderous actions, her publicized writings contain no such reference.

Headlines

• Democrat Governor Andy Beshear reelected to second term in Kentucky, overcoming state’s GOP dominance (AP)

• Democrats sweep Virginia legislature in blow to Governor Glenn Youngkin (New York Post)

• Ohio voters approve radical amendment removing limits on abortion, gender-transition procedures (National Review)

• Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves wins reelection bid over Brandon Presley (Washington Examiner)

• House approves bill slashing Pete Buttigieg’s salary to $1 (Fox News)

• Supreme Court seems likely to allow gun bans for those under protective orders (Washington Post)

• Credit card balances spiked in the third quarter to a $1.08 trillion record (CNBC)

• Ibram X. Kendi decries “racist” financial audit after Boston University clears his beleaguered Antiracist Research Center (Washington Free Beacon)

• Hamas leaders worth staggering $11 billion revel in luxury — while Gaza’s people suffer (New York Post)

• Policy: Israel crisis signals need to bolster U.S. homeland security — including Internet infrastructure (Forbes)

• Humor: More grocery stores installing defibrillators at checkout for when you see your total (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.