• Patel hearings: “The erosion of trust is evident: Only 40% of Americans hold a favorable view of the FBI.” So said Kash Patel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed one day ahead of yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. Democrats fear the prospect of Patel, Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, deweaponizing the bureau so that it faithfully adheres to a single tier of justice — rather than spying on presidential campaigns, rigging elections, stifling free speech, and targeting concerned parents, peaceful pro-lifers, and “radical-traditionalist Catholics.” The Democrats tried everything from COVID to J6, but Patel hit back hard: “Any accusations … that I would somehow put political bias before the Constitution are grotesquely unfair,” he said. Did they lay a glove on him? Not according to left-leaning Politico’s glum headline: “Kash Patel’s hearing, expected to produce fireworks, was mostly a dud.” Look for him to be confirmed by the Senate next week.

• Gabbard hearings: Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee for her confirmation hearing on Thursday. Gabbard faced questions and criticism regarding her past meeting with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. She also was repeatedly pressed to identify CIA leaker Edward Snowden as a “traitor.” Having praised him in the past, she refused to while vowing that she was committed to speaking “truth to power.” Gabbard, who was formerly a Democrat and even ran in the 2016 Democrat presidential primary, recently switched to the Republican Party, becoming a staunch advocate for Trump’s agenda of eliminating the deep state within Washington. She faces a razor-thin margin for confirmation.

• Humor: Democrat senators oppose diversity for one day only (Babylon Bee)

• Trump’s buyout offer roils the federal workforce: “If people aren’t coming to work, if they’re not going to come into the office and report [by February 6], then they’re going to be terminated,” said Donald Trump in reiterating his directive to work-from-home federal workers. Asked whether he’s worried that his proposed buyout might create a shortage in the federal workforce, he replied, “Then they’ll be replaced with very competent people. We have a lot of very competent people in this country.” This was all too much for NBC News, which reported, “Fear, anger and confusion have swept across federal agencies as workers grapple with a deluge of orders from President Donald Trump that they see as an effort to ‘scare’ them out of their jobs.” Trump intends to fix a broken system, and his generous buyout offer gives federal workers a choice. Aren’t Democrats all about “choice”?

• Humor: Federal workers concerned that returning to office will interfere with them not working (Babylon Bee)

• Trump issues a school choice EO: There are few initiatives that Democrats hate more than school choice. That’s because they’ve got the teachers unions in their electoral pockets and because they know that the competition that school choice entails is very bad for their white-knuckle grip on American educational power. On Wednesday, Donald Trump continued his shock-and-awe approach by issuing an executive order prioritizing federal funding for school choice programs. In addition, the order gives the Education and Labor Departments 90 days in which to review their discretionary grant programs and submit plans for how to expand school choice. It also directs the Department of Defense to submit a plan to facilitate the use of DOD funds by military families for sending their kids to the schools of their choice. Here again, the Left objects to the people having a choice.

• Watchdog claims DOJ broke law removing J6 database: The leftist organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) accused the Trump administration of violating the law after the Justice Department erased a government database listing the names of January 6 defendants from the web. “The DOJ’s removal of this database is squarely in line with President Trump’s ongoing efforts to rewrite or erase the insurrection and likely violates federal law,” CREW alleged. Following Donald Trump’s blanket pardon of some 1,500 J6 defendants, the online government database listing their names was removed. The National Archives and Records Administration rejected the charge that removing the database runs afoul of the law, noting, “Databases and other web content may be removed from public access while being preserved in accordance with the law.”

• FCC opens probe into NPR, PBS over commercials: New Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has opened up an investigation into National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service over concerns that member stations of the taxpayer-funded public media organizations have run commercials in violation of federal law. In a letter to NPR and PBS, Carr wrote, “It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.” Republicans have long called for the elimination of taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS due to their blatant leftist bias. The organizations’ presidents responded by saying they were confident that the outfits had not violated any laws.

• The Democrats’ profound polling woes: Imagine a brand so badly damaged that it has to look up to see lowly Bud Light. Welcome to today’s leaderless and rudderless Democrat Party, which, according to a new Quinnipiac poll, attracts a favorable opinion from just 31% of voters while 57% have an unfavorable opinion. This is the worst number the poll has produced for the Democrats since Quinnipiac began asking the question. Ouch. Adding insult to injury, the poll shows Donald Trump’s approval rating is 10 points higher than when he began his first presidential term. These numbers support another finding from Quinnipiac — that people are more confident in their future now that Trump is in office: 54% say they’re generally optimistic about the next four years, while just 42% are generally pessimistic.

• Race hustler Ibram X. Kendi leaves BU: After just 16 months, Ibram X. Kendi has shuttered his infamously unproductive Center for Anti-Racism at Boston University and is moving his race-hustling outfit to the more welcoming venue of Howard University. This will be Kendi’s third school, where he plans to open another “anti-racism” center yet again to ply his racial-grievance grift. It would seem that after burning through $50 million at BU in just three years, resulting in him having to lay off half his staff, he reasoned the gig was up and it was time to move his grift elsewhere. That said, Howard appears to be just the place for Kendi, as it is also home to other fellow race-hucksters like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Headlines

• Senate confirms Doug Burgum to lead Interior (Washington Free Beacon)

• Several top FBI officials are told to resign or face demotion (NBC News)

• Federal court rules ban on handgun sales to adults under age 21 is unconstitutional (NY Post)

• Tennessee passes school choice (Daily Wire)

• Meta employees “protest” removal of tampons from men’s rooms by bringing their own (Fox Business)

• U.S. takes out top terrorist in Syria (Daily Wire)

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