Cross-Examination

• Twitter suspends accounts over doxxing: Several journalists’ Twitter accounts were given a seven-day suspension on Thursday, which served to raise an outcry of hypocrisy by some against new CEO Elon Musk regarding his commitment to free speech. The suspensions followed Twitter’s banning of the account of Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida student who two years ago created an account that tracked in real time Musk’s private jet. Sweeney’s account was “permanently suspended” for failure to adhere to Twitter’s new anti-doxxing rule. Doxxing is the public sharing of personal data on individuals, like a physical home address, or in Musk’s case the real-time location of his private jet. However, Twitter’s sudden suspension of several mostly Leftmedia journalists was reported as being “arbitrary” censorship of journalists who were critical of Musk. A day prior, when objections were raised over Twitter’s suspension of Sweeney, Musk pointed to Twitter’s new anti-doxxing rule: “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.” He shared that his son had been “followed by crazy stalker (thinking it was me), who later blocked car from moving & climbed onto hood.” On Thursday, Musk reiterated that the “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.” That’s hardly hypocrisy or speech suppression.

• CDC coerced into purging inconvenient gun facts: The agenda of anti-Second Amendment activists is to eliminate Americans’ right to bear arms. In their effort to move their agenda forward, these anti-gun activists demonize firearms as the root cause of violent crime. Hence, any data that would undercut this narrative — data like the number of incidents in which firearms are used to prevent crime and protect life and property — must be effectively censored. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently caved to the anti-gun activists and removed statistical data from a study the agency had conducted on defensive gun use that found annually between 60,000 and 2.5 million times firearms were used to prevent crime. Mark Bryant, anti-gun activist and director of the Gun Violence Archive, objected to the CDC sharing such inconvenient data, writing in a 2021 email: “That 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again. It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value — even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.” After claiming the study had been “debunked” as “misinformation,” Bryant demanded it be removed from the CDC’s website. CDC officials at first resisted, but in yet another example of a politically motivated narrative trumping truth, the CDC has caved to the anti-gun lobby and removed the defensive gun use study from its site.

• Terrible government overregulation: The Biden administration has proposed a new maritime regulation in the name of saving endangered right whales that would do almost nothing to save the whales but would in turn endanger the lives and livelihoods of fishermen on the East Coast. Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the National Marine Manufactures Association (NMMA), described the new proposal as the “greatest regulatory overreach in American maritime law.” The Biden administration’s proposed regulation would restrict the speed of all boats 35 feet and longer to 10 knots (11.5 MPH) for seven months of the year within 100 miles of the coastline. The Biden administration claims that the rule will help reduce the risk of boats hitting and killing the endangered right whale, whose estimated total global population is just 350. Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Sportfishing Policy, summed it up by calling the new regulation “stupid,” “ridiculous,” “unjustifiable, ineffective, and unnecessary.” He noted that there’s less than one in a million chance of a fishing boat hitting a whale. Indeed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) admits that in the last 15 years there have been a total of five deadly whale strikes by 35- to 65-foot boats. The regulation is a danger for boaters, according to Chris Edmonston, Boat Owners Association of the U.S. president, who notes that 10 knots is too slow for boats to properly navigate the waves. It’s yet another example of bureaucratic red tape created without concern for or understanding of the negative ramifications such regulations may have.

Headlines

• Senate passes $858B defense spending bill, cuts COVID vaccine requirement for troops (NY Post) | However, Senate votes against reinstating troops kicked out over COVID vaccine mandate (Washington Examiner)

• Fate of Electoral Count Reform Act now tied to omnibus spending bill (Washington Examiner)

• Senate unanimously votes to ban TikTok on government devices (Daily Wire)

• “My nation’s original sin”: Biden offers Africa $55 billion, gets mocked by African leader (Daily Wire)

• Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger squelches New York Times claim he’s pushing ranked-choice voting (Daily Signal)

• Biden admin sues Arizona governor over shipping container border wall (Daily Wire)

• Major cities using federal COVID relief funds for guaranteed income projects (American Greatness)

• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg vacationed in Europe as rail unions were on verge of strike (Free Beacon)

• Nonbinary ex-Biden official Sam Brinton helped craft policy to hide student sex changes from parents (Washington Examiner)

• Feds open investigation into “deep-seated anti-Semitic discrimination” at Berkeley Law School (Free Beacon)

• Google will start marking the race of business owners (PJ Media)

• Homeschool students trounce public and private school peers in rigorous standardized test (Daily Wire)

• Fox News crushes CNN, MSNBC in 2022, finishes No. 1 among all of cable for 7th straight year (Fox News)

• Policy: Biden-created border crisis about to get a whole lot worse (Daily Signal)

• Satire: China threatens to fire senators who voted for TikTok ban (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.