Cross-Examination

• DOJ finally verifies Hunter’s laptop: Better laughably late than never, we suppose. On Tuesday, we learned that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is now quietly admitting the same truth that the rest of America understood from the moment they laid eyes upon that image of Hunter Biden passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth: that the laptop is real. The revelation came quietly, of course, in a filing focused on the younger Biden’s tax evasion case. Here’s the key part, fittingly captured by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine: “In August 2019, IRS and FBI investigators obtained a search warrant for tax violations for the defendant’s Apple iCloud account. In response to that warrant, in September 2019, Apple produced backups of data from various of the defendant’s electronic devices that he had backed up to his iCloud account. Investigators also later came into possession of the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store. A search warrant was also obtained for his laptop and the results of the search were largely duplicative of information investigators had already obtained from Apple.” Get a load of those dates. They had the contents of Hunter’s laptop in September 2019, three months before they confiscated the actual laptop from computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac. And yet, when the New York Post broke the story a full year later, the FBI was not only mum about its authenticity but also actively colluded with Facebook and Twitter to censor the story, stood quietly by while “The Dirty 51” senior intelligence officials published their phony “Russian disinformation” letter, and thereby decisively interfered with the 2020 election in order to benefit Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. Never forget.

• Journos: The 96%: Those of us who were enjoying the Christmas holiday and perhaps unplugging from the news of the world likely missed the publication of an annual study that delivered grim news about our ostensibly free and fair press. The study, which has been conducted annually since 1971 by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, found that a measly 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republicans, while 10 times more of them say they’re Democrats. This, of course, is a spectacular misrepresentation of the American people, whom a November Gallup poll on party affiliation found to be 29% Democrats, 29% Republicans, and 40% independents. As Fox News reports: “More than 1,600 journalists responded to a survey from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications and the results are damning. Only 3.4% of U.S. journalists claim to be Republicans, with another 36.4% saying they’re Democrats. That’s more than 10 times more Democrats than Republicans. Or at least the ones who will admit they are on the left.” As for the rest, 51.7% call themselves “independents” and another 8.5% “other.” But here’s the most damning part: They’ve been conducting this study since 1971, and in that first version, 35.5% said they were Democrats, 25.7% said they were Republicans, and 32.5% said they were Independents. This drift from relative balance to utter imbalance is no doubt behind the American people’s ever-increasing distrust of the mainstream media.

• Senior Border Patrol officers say they need more border wall: It would be nice if Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas actually listened to the Border Patrol agents he recently vowed to help before Congress. But Mayorkas continues to dismiss their expertise in the field of border enforcement by refusing to give them what they are asking for — a border wall. A wall is a “force multiplier,” one senior Border Patrol agent told the House Oversight and Accountability and Homeland Security Committees on Tuesday. A border wall “slows down the people as they come across, and so we have more time to respond and actually make an apprehension,” said Aaron Heitke, who recently retired as chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector. “It also moves people. It’s more difficult to cross through the barriers, and so they move to other areas where the barrier isn’t where we can focus resources.” Regarding the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy, which Mayorkas admitted was the case with 85% of migrants caught illegally crossing the border, chief patrol agent John R. Modlin says that exacerbates the problem. To stop this, Modlin advised, “The most obvious way to not encourage illegal migration is everyone’s held until they have a hearing.” The trouble is that Mayorkas refuses to listen to the experts.

• Emmy ratings tank as “the message” is pushed: This year’s Emmy Awards show that was broadcast on Fox Monday night hit a new ratings low, pulling in just 4.3 million viewers and continuing a long-running downward trend. The ratings company Nielsen noted that last year, when NBC telecast the show, it garnered 5.9 million viewers, which was the previous record-low rating. To put things in perspective, the Emmys pulled in more than 21 million viewers back in 2000. What’s leading to this drop-off in viewership? Much of it has to do with Hollywood’s promulgating of hard-left woke ideology, especially when it comes to promoting sexual deviancy like “transgenderism.” Case in point: The Emmys gave the Television Academy’s Governors Award to GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis, who took the opportunity to call for Hollywood to produce even more gender-bending stories featuring gender-bending actors. It’s not as if Americans aren’t already subjected to an overrepresentation of these sexually deviant characters and stories in TV shows and movies. A study from UCLA School of Law’s William Institute found that less than 1% of adults identify as “transgender,” but 5.4% of characters across all TV platforms from 2022 to 2023 identified as “transgender.” Meanwhile, if the trans lobby truly believes that “trans women are women,” then what are they whining about since women are well represented on TV?

• What a drag it is being drag: We’re all about liberty here in our humble editorial shop, but United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby is, well, a weirdo. As the irrepressible Libs of TikTok posted earlier this week: “This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of [United Air Lines]. He likes to dress up in drag. United hired a drag queen to be their CEO and now United has turned their focus to incorporating drag into their business and sponsoring drag shows.” Far be it from us to judge a guy who likes to dress up as Travis Kelce’s girlfriend, but this is the same CEO who says he takes race and gender into account in his hiring decisions and says, shamefully and hatefully, that there are too many white males in the airline industry. Furthermore, Kirby says he’s committed to ensuring 50% of their graduating pilot classes are women or people of color. Frequent flyers among our readership might want to take this into consideration next time they book a flight.

• Your tax dollars at work: The Department of Health and Human Services plans to give nearly $700,000 in funding for a teenage pregnancy prevention program aimed at teenage girls who identify as boys. Using the nonsense term “trans boys,” Joe Biden’s HHS aims to encourage teenage girls who identify as boys to use condoms during sex. The HHS grant will go to the Center for Innovative Public Health Research in California, where woke researchers claim that “trans-identified youth may be less likely to use condoms when having sex with people who have penises and are at least as likely as cisgender girls to be pregnant.” They argue that this program is needed because “this health inequity must be addressed.” This is not just a waste of Americans’ tax dollars, but worse, it is the funding of the deliberate spread of a morally destructive societal contagion wrapped in the guise of “healthcare.”

• Argentina’s new president blasts socialism at Davos: Javier Milei, Argentina’s recently elected libertarian and anti-socialist president, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Milei took the opportunity to blast socialism as the problem and the leading threat to the Western world. He excoriated the world leaders “who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.” He continued, “The main leaders of the world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.” He then added, “We’re here to tell you collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause.” Amen.

• Dubunking the “Trump can’t win” canard: If you’ve been following Republican presidential politics of late, you’ve no doubt heard this repeated refrain from anti-Trump Republicans: The guy can’t possibly win. This is the raison d'être for Nikki Haley’s campaign: that she’s more electable than Trump. But is it true, or might the “electability” landscape have changed? We’ve made this point more than once, and now one of the nation’s most astute political thinkers, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, is making it too: According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Donald Trump beats Joe Biden head-to-head by 1.3 points; Nikki Haley beats Biden by 0.4 points; and Ron DeSantis loses to Biden by 0.4 points. “The bottom line,” writes York, “is that … a single-point difference is not something to get all excited about, but what can certainly be said is that the polls do not show Haley with a big advantage over Trump in matchups with Biden.” Even Jim Geraghty of National Review is coming around, albeit in a backhanded way. He says Democrats should be worried, and he claims Trump’s chances of winning have increased, but only because Biden is so unpopular. But he fails to ask why Biden is so unpopular. And a big part of his unpopularity has to do with folks remembering how much better things were when Donald Trump was president.

Headlines

• Supreme Court hears fishermen’s challenges to costly regulatory authority of feds (Daily Signal)

• Fourteen House Democrats vote to denounce Biden admin’s “open-borders policies” (Daily Wire) | Abbott’s win in court of appeals means the buoys live to float another day … for now (Hot Air)

• Davos escort services are “completely booked” during 2024 conference (Valuetainment)

• Maine secretary of state ordered to delay Trump ballot decision until after Colorado ruling by Supreme Court (Washington Examiner)

• JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warns Democrats to be “more respectful” of Trump supporters — or risk losing election (New York Post)

• Feds flagged terms like “Trump,” “MAGA” for banks to comb through customer data (Daily Wire)

• U.S. military launches more strikes against Houthi sites in Yemen (AP)

• Pakistan carries out retaliatory strikes inside of Iran (Daily Wire)

• Some student loan borrowers refusing to pay out of protest (Fox Business)

• Top trans pediatric doctors admit in unearthed video that puberty blockers aren’t as “reversible” as advertised (Daily Caller) | WHO admits evidence supporting “gender-affirming care” in children is “limited and variable” (National Review)

• Chinese lab mapped COVID-19 virus two weeks before sharing information globally (National Review)

• China’s population declines again despite its best propaganda efforts (Hot Air)

• Policy: Supreme Court must answer whether judges or bureaucrats have final word on federal law (Daily Signal)

• Humor: America decides to cancel election and just draft that Argentinian guy for president (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.