Once again, everyone is talking about classified material. But we’ve been telling you for years, and I know from personal experience, that a lot of material is being classified to keep secrets from the American people, not our enemies. But there’s another point to keep in mind.

Just about every week there are major articles in papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post that claim high-ranking officials are alleging (fill in the blank). What follows almost always comes from information that expands the power of government and the political left, and frequently damages conservatives.

The articles often say that their “sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because” they weren’t authorized to speak about their knowledge of certain classified materials.

For years now, conservatives have been stonewalled whenever they tried to conduct oversight of federal agencies like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the Justice Department, which they are required by law to do. They’ll get back hundreds of pages with most of the documents redacted — blacked out and totally useless.

When FBI Director Christopher Wray was testifying before Congress recently, he was asked how many FBI agents were in the crowd on January 6th. Wray refused to answer in an open hearing because he claimed it might compromise confidential sources.

Classifying information has become a “racket” and a political weapon of the Deep State to defeat anyone who tries to rein in its power.

I don’t want 21 year-old National Guardsmen to be leaking U.S. intelligence. But so far, everything that has come out appears to be information our enemies already knew.

Russia knows that the situation in Ukraine is not how Western media have described it. South Korea knows it was reluctant to ship artillery shells from its frontline with North Korea to Ukraine’s frontline. The only people who didn’t know these things were us — the American people.

At this point, there is enough information in those documents that should cause outrage over the disaster that we euphemistically call “the Biden foreign policy.”

Budweiser’s About Face

The corporate marketing geniuses at Bud Light really stepped in it. The beer company thought it would be really cool to make transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney the face of their latest ad campaign. It didn’t go over very well.

I don’t know who Bud Light executives think is drinking their product, but I seriously doubt it’s a bunch of guys in dresses pretending to be women. One sports bar owner said, “In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else, including their traditional audience.”

It seems a lot of Bud Light fans quickly “transitioned” to other beverages as sales of Bud Light dropped significantly.

Working-class America responded strongly to the Dylan Mulvaney outrage, and it reminds us of what the majority coalition in America is. It’s men and women of faith plus the hard-working men and women of all races who make up Middle America.

Nike also went all in on the transgender insanity, sponsoring its own sports bra ad campaign with Mulvaney. All of a sudden in response to Nike, the “Burn Bra Challenge” was born. Women all over America were burning their Nike sports bras in protest of Nike’s woke agenda and their new “spokesman,” who is a mocking parody of women.

Anheuser-Busch, which owns Budweiser, was really spooked by the backlash. CEO Brendan Whitworth issued a lengthy statement Friday, saying, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.”

I think that was intended to be an apology, but I’m not buying it. Maybe Whitworth didn’t know what Bud Light’s marketing department was up to, but I refuse to believe he didn’t realize how divisive the radical transgender issue is.

Meanwhile, his company rolled out a new patriotic, pro-American ad this weekend featuring its celebrated Clydesdale horses and scenes of famous American landmarks. It’s a good ad.

The fact that Anheuser-Busch felt compelled to release it now speaks volumes about the blowback the company has received.

But for the vast majority of Americans who refuse to lie about reality, it’s going to take a lot more than slick marketing to win back their trust.

Pray For Justice Thomas

The neo-Marxist left has launched yet another jihad against Justice Clarence Thomas. This time, multiple left-wing journalists with nothing better to do are digging into his friendships, examining his vacation travel and the most absurd details of his personal finances.

The stories have had the desired effect. Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders is demanding that Thomas be investigated by the Biden Justice Department. New York socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for Thomas to be impeached. Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also foaming at the mouth.

The left would love nothing more than to force Thomas off the bench so Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer could replace him with another far-left activist who doesn’t know what a woman is.

Clarence Thomas is a good and decent man, who loves our country and our Constitution. Please pray for him and his wife, Ginny, as they continue to suffer the smears of the intolerant left.

2024 Update

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo withdrew from the 2024 presidential race Friday. While Pompeo is a good man, the political market for the traditional GOP interventionist foreign policy seems weak at best.

In related news, it appears that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin may be taking himself out of contention as well.

Day Of Remembrance

Last night, Israelis began to observe Yom HaShoah, a national day of remembrance for the heroes and martyrs of the Holocaust.

Fighting the evil of anti-Semitism has always been a major priority of my work, including when I served as a Trump-appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. At my urging, the commission held a seminar and a hearing on Capitol Hill about the growing threat of anti-Semitism and how to combat it.

Sadly, there’s been a very disturbing surge of anti-Semitism in America. According to the latest report from the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents increased by 36% in 2022 to a record high. The number of physical assaults jumped 26%.

The ADL insists that this “dramatic increase … cannot be attributed to any one cause or ideology.” But, whatever the explanation, anti-Semitism is clearly a growing problem in Joe Biden’s America.

While we remember the first Holocaust, we must never forget that the Islamic Republic of Iran is insisting on another one. Iran’s leaders have repeatedly called for a second Holocaust through the “annihilation” of Israel and its seven million Jewish citizens.