Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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Elon Musk helps get information out of Iran and to the rest of the world

The New York Times is finally paying real attention to the situation in Iran. THis is a screen capture from their website front page on January 13, 2026. Click to enlarge>.

As we have previously noted, the credentialed media has been publishing rather little on the popular uprisings in Iran. Slightly more has been coming out, but information has still been sparse. More information has been coming out over social media, though, interestingly enough, far less on Bluesky than on Twitter, at least as far as I’ve personally seen. Iran has been fighting that, with a curious number of accounts, including some which were pro-‘Palestinian,’ supporting the theocratic regime over the human rights of the Persian people rising against that tyranny.

Now, Elon Musk is helping the protesters. From The Wall Street Journal:

Iran Is Hunting Down Starlink Users to Stop Protest Videos From Going Global

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and authorities’ actions

By Benoit Faucon | Monday, January 12, 2026 | 11:00 AM EST

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world.

But Iran has intensified efforts to jam the service, which is banned in the country, and users are being hunted.

If the Journal‘s paywall is stopping you from reading the original, it can be read here for free.

Over the weekend, authorities began searching for and confiscating Starlink dishes in western Tehran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a U.S. nonprofit opposed to internet censorship.

“It’s electronic warfare,” Rashidi said. He said disruptions are worst in parts of Tehran where protests are taking place and in the evening, when the demonstrators gather.

The battle over information—while secondary to the confrontations taking place nightly in dozens of cities across Iran—has potentially serious consequences. President Trump has threatened to intervene in response to a crackdown by the regime.

Let me stress at this point that I do not support any American military action to support the protesters. Yes, I want them to succeed, I want the whole Iranian government to fall, but this needs to be done by the Iranian people themselves, and not something which the Islamists can say was pushed by the United States. Iranians themselves need to Make Iran Great Again!

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and the actions of Iranian authorities.

That has always been a problem: with the cutoff of communications by the Iranian government, the credentialed media have far fewer ways to verify stories which come from a single source.

More than 500 people have been killed in the unrest, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. Another rights group, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, circulated video footage Sunday showing a large number of bodies at a morgue in south Tehran.

Trump is scheduled to be briefed Tuesday on his options. One under discussion is to send in more Starlink terminals. Trump said he would ask Musk about the possibility.

“We may get the internet going if that’s possible,” Trump told the reporters.

Iran shut down most internet connections for the country’s 90 million inhabitants late last week, after protests over a crippling economic crisis exploded into large-scale unrest with demonstrators chanting for an end to the regime. The government has also made it difficult to connect calls or send text messages.

The only exceptions are the government itself, its media services and regime loyalists who are registered on a “whitelist” of internet addresses, said diplomats and others communicating with some of those with uninterrupted access.

Well, of course, and I’m seeing that junk on Twitter, gobs of it. The Iranian government and their propagandists have been blaming the uprisings not on the collapsing economy or severe water shortages, but on the United States and Israel; the Great Satan and the Jooooos are always the ones responsible! To the leaders of the Islamic Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have diverted rain clouds, and the US and Israel have manipulated the weather.

We don’t know yet how this will turn out. It’s clear that huge numbers of Iranians are displeased with their government, but the government has guns, and has not been afraid to use them. We can all hope that the theocratic regime will be overthrown, though there’s no way of telling how that will work out for a new government.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Sadly, some newspapers are in a heap o' trouble, too

There are times when I wonder whether the newspaper industry is bent on committing suicide. In reading the story on the capture of 37-year-old Michael Dunn in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and planning to add to my “You in a heap o’ trouble, boy” series, I was sadly amused that the newspaper had used only a stock photo of a criminal’s wrists in handcuffs. Since it is the policy of this site to print mugshots, I initiated a Google search for Michael Dunn Kentucky, and there it was, screen captured on the right, with three television stations and what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal listed as the four top stories, with three showing the now-captured fugitive’s mugshot, and the newspaper not, exactly the type of thing which would cause people searching for this story to pick a source other than the newspaper.

Missing Kentucky child, 13, found with 37-year-old man wanted for escape

By Karla Ward | Saturday, January 10, 2026 | 7:00 AM EST

A missing 13-year-old girl from Louisville was found in Knox County on Thursday in the company of a 37-year-old man who was wanted on outstanding warrants, according to the Barbourville Police Department.

The girl had been reported missing Jan. 4.

The London office of the U.S. Marshals Service’s Central Kentucky Fugitive Task Force was notified on Thursday that she was thought to be with Michael Dunn, 37, the police department said in a social media post.

Dunn had been wanted in Jefferson County since June on felony warrants including second-degree escape and tampering with a prisoner monitoring device. He also was wanted for probation violations for receiving stolen property and possession of a handgun by a convicted felon, police said, as well as first-degree possession of a controlled substance.

That paragraph is important, because it informs us that Mr Dunn was not just a criminal suspect, but a convicted felon.

Dunn “was known to be armed, dangerous, and trafficking narcotics,” police said.

At about 10:50 p.m. Thursday, the U.S. Marshals, with help from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office and the Barbourville Police Department, learned that Dunn and the girl were walking south on the 3100 block of U.S. 25E in Barbourville.

Task force officers, deputies and officers confronted them and took Dunn into custody, police said.

The missing child was safely recovered and taken to a local hospital. She was medically cleared and reunited with her family at about 3:30 a.m. Friday.

There’s more at the original. It will be the natural assumption that a 37-year-old fugitive with a 13-year-old girl is indicative of a perverted sexual situation, but none of the news sources indicates that is the suspicion, and at least one source has actually named the girl, complete with a link to the missing persons notification that includes her photograph, something unusual if the possible sexual assault of a minor is concerned.

That the Herald-Leader did not include the mugshot of Mr Dunn would be part of the McClatchy Mugshot Policy[1]McClatchy Mugshot Policy: Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean … Continue reading, though that policy shouldn’t really apply. The policy is meant to protect those arrested and accused but not yet convicted of a crime, as well as “the inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness,” but the accused is a white male, and has already been convicted.

We note this because, as we reported in November, the Herald-Leader has moved to print publication only three days a week, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, to be delivered not by carriers, but mail, with the Sunday edition being delivered in Saturday’s mail, because the United States Postal Service does not deliver mail on Sundays.

I am reminded of Vernon Dursley’s happiness that “there’s no post on Sunday.”[2]J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had previously gone to a thrice-a-week print schedule, announced just a few days ago that it would cease all publication, print and digital, on May 3rd.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shutting down

Earlier this week, owner Block Communications also announced the closure of City Paper, a Pittsburgh alt-weekly.

by Emily Bloch | Wednesday, January 7, 2026 | 2:41 PM EST

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will fold after nearly a century. The paper will cease operations entirely — both its digital and physical versions — on May 3.

The announcement comes on the heels of years of declining ad revenue and internal strife within the newsroom, including a yearslong labor strike.

With the paper’s closure, there are concerns that Pittsburgh could become a news desert, leaving locals without a range of diverse and credible outlets to turn to in an age of increasing misinformation.

The Post-Gazette was led by former Inquirer senior vice president and executive editor Stan Wischnowski. He resigned from The Inquirer in 2020 after a controversy following a headline after the murder of George Floyd.

That last was a mealy-mouthed way to put it. Mr Wischnowski’s ‘resignation’ was forced due to a revolt among the #woke[3]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading staffers at the Inky for writing a catchy headline, “Buildings Matter, Too” designed to catch the eye and attract people to actually read the story, but staffers apparently thought that this was downplaying the seriousness of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement which was torching buildings, including black-owned businesses and residences, in the City of Brotherly Love as well as other places.

Why did I cite a story from The Philadelphia Inquirer concerning the Post-Gazette’s closure? It was because the Post-Gazette’s own story was hidden behind a paywall!

The upcoming closure of the Post-Gazette has generated all kinds of stories, including two separate ones asking if the newspaper can be saved, plus at least one calling the closure a “threat to democracy.”

Is it really a threat to democracy? As we reported on the 8th, the credentialed media were very slow and sparse in their reporting on the popular uprising in Iran. This site, and many, many others, noted how the credentialed media pointedly ignored President Joe Biden’s descent into dementia, something obvious enough that William Teach noted it in August of 2021, yet the legacy media, wholly in the bag for the Democrats, wouldn’t report anything that might have endangered Mr Biden’s re-election prospects against then-former President Donald Trump.

We saw how well that worked out for them!

If the Post-Gazette could not survive printing just three days a week, in Allegheny County, population 1,231,814, how can the Herald-Leader do so with 329,437 people in Fayette County?

McClatchy has already been cutting staff.

We previously noted how the Lexington newspaper, which has always specialized in covering University of Kentucky sports, gave scant coverage to the women’s volleyball team, which made it all the way to the national championship game, and the #6 ranked women’s basketball team, while publishing scads of stories on the middling, 9-6, and unranked men’s basketball squad and disastrous, 5-7, football team. How can a newspaper survive if it doesn’t actually print much news?

References

References
↑1 McClatchy Mugshot Policy:

Publishing mugshots of arrestees has been shown to have lasting effects on both the people photographed and marginalized communities. The permanence of the internet can mean those arrested but not convicted of a crime have the photograph attached to their names forever. Beyond the personal impact, inappropriate publication of mugshots disproportionately harms people of color and those with mental illness. In fact, some police departments have started moving away from taking/releasing mugshots as a routine part of their procedures. To address these concerns, McClatchy will not publish crime mugshots — online, or in print, from any newsroom or content-producing team — unless approved by an editor. To be clear, this means that in addition to photos accompanying text stories, McClatchy will not publish “Most wanted” or “Mugshot galleries” in slide-show, video or print. Any exception to this policy must be approved by an editor. Editors considering an exception should ask:

  • Is there an urgent threat to the community?
  • Is this person a public official or the suspect in a hate crime?
  • Is this a serial killer suspect or a high-profile crime?

If an exception is made, editors will need to take an additional step with the Pub Center to confirm publication by making a note in the ‘package notes‘ field in Sluglife.

I have not been able to access the McClatchy Mugshot Policy directly, as it does not seem to have been published externally. The only reason I have it is that two McClatchy reporters tweeted it out after it was imposed in August of 2020, and it is possible that some changes have been made to it subsequently.

↑2 J K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter 1.
↑3 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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It’s too bad she is gone, but Renee was up to no Good

The left really, really needed a sap like Renee Nicole Good to become a martyr for their cause. They want to completely end immigration enforcement, and hope that the death of this not-very-bright woman — and how great for their propaganda it was that she was a white woman! — will persuade more Americans that we should stop enforcing our immigration laws.

I have wondered how the leftist rallying groups managed to get their parade signs printed so quickly and professionally and identically across many cities after events. The American left protesting against the military raid and capture of Venezuelan narco-terrorist Nicolas Maduro were out in the streets that very morning, complete with professionally printed signs. That points to just one thing: a dedicated and professional organization pushing their stuff, with plenty of money behind them.

Here’s who’s really behind the Minneapolis ICE resistance movement

By Isabel Vincent | Thursday, January 8, 2026 | Updated: Friday, January 9, 2026 | 6:32 AM EST

Radical leftist groups, including one financed with $7.8 million from progressive billionaire George Soros, are behind the anti-ICE protests in Minnesota, The Post has learned.

Indivisible Twin Cities[1]Hyperlink not in cited original, but added by me., which describes itself as a grassroots group of volunteers, has led many of the protests against ICE raids in Minnesota, where Renee Nicole Good was shot dead Wednesday after allegedly trying to mow down an ICE agent with her vehicle.

Indivisible is an offshoot of the Indivisible Project in Washington, DC, which bills itself as a movement to defeat the “Trump agenda,” and received $7,850,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations between 2018 and 2023, according to public records.

Make no mistake here: many of those outraged liberals who are trying to interfere with immigration law enforcement have no connection with the Soros crime family, and are outraged on their own, but that doesn’t matter: they are nevertheless the “useful idiots,” to use the term Vladimir Ilich Lenin supposedly coined, aiding an enemy they might not even understand exists. Few really understood how George Soros tried to undermine American society by sponsoring criminal-loving, police-hating district attorney candidates, but millions voted for those same candidates, unwittingly doing the Soros’ family’s work for them.

As a 13-year-old boy, Mr Soros was used by the Nazis to hand out deportation notices to Jews living in occupied Hungary, and if we can forgive a young teenager for doing what the Nazis forced him to do, it doesn’t look like he wants to do the democratic West any favors.

77,303,568 Americans voted for then former President Donald Trump, and his promises to close the border and deport the illegal immigrants already here, while then Vice President and not really “border tsar” Kamala Harris Emhoff, assigned by President Biden to address the renewed surge in illegal immigrants that came once Mr Trump’s first term was over, received fewer, 75,019,230, the voters clearly chose President Trump’s policies over the surge in illegals Mr Biden and Mrs Emhoff allowed.

When Republicans sought a greater say in the crafting of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill and healthcare reform legislation, the President reportedly told them, “Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election,” and then added, “Elections have consequences.” It seems that our good friends on the left don’t like those consequences, now that Mr Trump is President again, but he is doing what he said he would do, and what the people voted for him to do.

The law is simple: 18 U.S. Code § 111 – Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees

(a)In General.—Whoever—

(1)forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with any person designated in section 1114 of this title while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties; or
(2)forcibly assaults or intimidates any person who formerly served as a person designated in section 1114 on account of the performance of official duties during such person’s term of service,

shall, where the acts in violation of this section constitute only simple assault, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both, and where such acts involve physical contact with the victim of that assault or the intent to commit another felony, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.

(b)Enhanced Penalty.—
Whoever, in the commission of any acts described in subsection (a), uses a deadly or dangerous weapon (including a weapon intended to cause death or danger but that fails to do so by reason of a defective component) or inflicts bodily injury, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Whether she realized it or not, Miss Good, in attempting to block ICE agents was in violation of §111(a)(1), and striking the agent with her vehicle became eligible for the enhanced penalty specified in §111(b).

The penalty should not be death, but in the series of actions in the event, that’s what she got.

References

References
↑1 Hyperlink not in cited original, but added by me.
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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left and the media go nuts over bruising on President Trump’s hands

Searching Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — for Trump bruised hand brings up scads of tweets, mostly from our good friends on the left, searching for something, anything! to somehow trash our 47th President. Shredder Girl wrote, “CNN ignored every concern about Joe Biden’s health but they’re all over Trump’s bruised hand”.

Bruising on Trump’s left hand sparks renewed questions about his health

By Adam Cancryn | New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2025

New bruising on Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.

Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.

The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.

And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.

“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”

Donald Trump is President of the United States, and the President’s health is always something of a public concern, but somehow, some way, our credentialed media managed to ignore every concern about the health of our 46th President, even as he was tripping on stairs, losing his train of thought, and just plain zoning out in public, right up until they couldn’t hide things any more.

Didn’t President Joe Biden look handsome and strong and healthy there? That’s the image the Democrats and the Biden campaign tried to project, and you were supposed to believe it. The tweet screen captured to the right is time-stamped at 10:53 PM, after the debate.

Jennifer Rubin is the former ‘neoconservative’ columnist and warmonger for The Washington Post, always agitating for more money and weapons to keep the Russo-Ukrainian War going, and completely infected by #TrumpDerangementSyndrome. On May 19, 2024, she wrote:

President Biden took the media and political world by surprise in challenging Donald Trump to two debates — and then swiftly accepting offers from CNN and ABC. Trump accepted the debates, on June 27 and Sept. 10, but whether he will show up is another matter.

Yup, Mr Trump showed up! Oops! Then the whole nation saw what the credentialed media, the ones who tell us All the News That’s Fit to Print, the ones who say that Democracy Dies in Darkness, didn’t previously print, didn’t want to life the darkness.

It’s hardly the first time that the credentialed media stifled any criticisms of a presidential candidate’s health: they covered up for Hillary Clinton as well, her several falls and then her brief lapse into catatonia, minimizing what they couldn’t completely hide.

But, alas! it seems that the media being reticent only applies to Democratic candidates.

Is Mr Trump’s health in question? He is, after all, 79 years old, he’s obese, and he loves his junk food. He has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a common condition among older adults, something which can explain his frequently swollen ankles. But somehow, some way, I don’t see that stuff as being disqualifying for Mr Trump to continue as President. Franklin Roosevelt managed to lead us through World War II when he was mostly dependent upon a wheelchair, and could only walk with heavy metal braces on his legs.

The Democrats thought that Joe Biden could run again, even though he was clearly sinking into dementia, all because they hate Republicans in general, and Mr Trump very, very specifically.

But now the left are fixated on our current President’s ankles and bruised hands.

Nevertheless, at his advanced age, it’s always possible that Mr Trump could fall too ill to do his job, or even die. But that’s where we are fortunate, in that the insipid Mike Pence is not Vice President, and J D Vance is. I suppose it would then be his turn to be ‘literally Hitler.’

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“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” ― William F. Buckley

I will admit it: there was a strong feeling of amusement among sensible people when the simpleton from Sweden was arrested for protesting in support of the British pro-terrorism group. Greta Thunberg had made a name for herself as a climate kook, but has branched out in support of Hamas, Palestinian terrorism, and against Western civilization defending ourselves from the forces of barbarism, even though it is Western civilization itself which gave her the luxury to protest against anything rather than having to spend her time and energy scratching the dirt in hopes of feeding herself and the three or so kids she’d have popped out by now in a subsistence lifestyle.

But there is a more important point which needs to be made: our British forebears and other European ancestors have been criminalizing the freedom of speech which we take for granted.

Amy Coney Barrett Issues Free Speech Warning

Wednesday, December 24, 2025 | 9:41 AM EST

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has warned about threats to free speech in the United Kingdom.

Coney made the remarks during an interview with Bishop Robert Barron for an episode of his podcast, Bishop Barron Presents, which was released on Sunday.

“Think about what’s happening with respect to free speech rights in the U.K.,” Barrett said during a discussion about the purpose of law. “Contrary opinions or opinions that are not in the mainstream are not being tolerated, and they’re even being criminalized. Because of the First Amendment, that can’t happen here.”

It can’t? it wasn’t until Associate Justice Ruth Ginsberg went to her eternal reward and Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed that the Supreme Court took freedom of religion into account when it came to the restrictions that states put on churches to fight the COVID-19 panicdemic.[1]No, that’s not a typographical error; panicdemic was exactly how I intended to spell it, because panic is exactly how governments reacted.

It was under the Administration of President Joe Biden that an FBI “Analyst” submitted a proposal to monitor traditional Catholics who prefer the Tridentine, or Traditional Latin, Mass, “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics,” or RTEs, he called them, because “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists,” or RMVEs might be interested in using Latin Mass Catholics to spread their goals.

Someone leaked a hand-redacted, redacted by magic marker, copy of the “FBI internal use only” document, and the Bureau decided, rather quickly, that they ought to withdraw the document entirely.

FBI retracts leaked document orchestrating investigation of Catholics

By Tyler Arnold and Joe Bukuras | Thursday, February 9, 2023 | 3:15 PM EST

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau’s Richmond division launched an investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics and their possible ties to “the far-right white nationalist movement.”

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because “it does not meet our exacting standards.”

Really? The document is ‘sourced’ citing far-left political sources, including Salon, The Atlantic, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. If there are less biased sources, they were redacted from the document. It’s so bad that it makes me wonder: if it was a great departure from the Bureau’s “exacting standards,” why wouldn’t the document author have realized it, and the Bureau have flagged it before it was leaked? Or is the document not really that great a departure from those “exacting standards,” which calls into question just how “exacting” those standards really are.

Can we tell the truth here? The document was retracted because it was leaked, and the FBI were embarrassed. But without our First Amendment, not only would a government investigation of “radical traditionalist Catholics” be perfectly legal and not questionable at all, but the fact that the “FBI internal use only” document was leaked and published could have been illegal.

Barrett’s comments come as Britain has faced increased scrutiny over its policing of speech, including from Vice President JD Vance, in recent months.

Some critics have focused on the Online Safety Act, rolled out this year, which requires social media companies to remove illegal content on their platforms. Critics say is being implemented too broadly and has resulted in the censorship of legal content.

Even with our First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press, our good friends on the left have waxed apoplectic over the freedoms which allow non-liberal, non-leftist news and opinions to be disseminated, as Michael Tomasky, editor of the New Republic blamed those freedoms for Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat, even as his own magazine was using those very same freedoms to publish.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

One thing has been made clear: our First — and Second! — Amendment rights have been under attack even here, not by sensible conservatives, but by the left. Under President Biden, himself (purportedly) a Catholic, we’ve seen attacks on the freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and peaceable assembly, because the left absotively, posilutely hate that their great truths can be challenged.

Thus, while we can chuckle at the fact that a crackpot was arrested for demonstrating in support of the pro-Palestinian British hunger strikers — most of whom have given up their hunger strike anyway — we need to remember that the threats to our freedoms come from the left, and the Biden Administration proved that the plain words of the Constitution mean nothing more than an inconvenient impediment to their goals and them, not a absolute block. We need to support Miss Thunberg’s freedom of speech and peaceable association not because we agree with her, but because we strongly disagree, because that is how we defend ourselves.

References

References
↑1 No, that’s not a typographical error; panicdemic was exactly how I intended to spell it, because panic is exactly how governments reacted.
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Twitter has become a go to site for left-wing propaganda! But not to worry, conservatives still have their voices there as well.

Sensible people and patriotic Americans were all very, very glad when Elon Musk bought Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — and installed a (mostly) free speech environment. Freedom of Speech is a good thing, a great thing, something enshrined as a constitutional right in our First Amendment.

But, alas! as we have noted many times previously, the American left are not quite so supportive. Michael Tomasky, Editor of The New Republic, blamed Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. We noted previously, that, before being bought out by Elon Musk, Twitter had already taken sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, no dissent can be tolerated, and dissention could result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Robert Stacy McCain lost his old @rsmccain account, which had something like 10,000 followers, and his newer The Patriarch Tree account has only 2,522, because he said politically incorrect things.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble. The newspaper has never really liked that Freedom of Speech and of the Press actually applies to people other than themselves.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

One thing Mr Musk did not do, though Mr Tomasky claimed he would, was turn Twitter into a right-wing site. What Mr Musk did was to end (most) of the censorship of conservatives, but he didn’t rein in liberals. I’m still seeing the same bovine feces from the left that I always did, but now we have something new: the pro-‘Palestinian’ bots are flooding Twitter with messages about the poor, poor ‘Palestinians,’ suffering because Israel destroyed much of Gaza, in a war that the ‘Palestinians’ started. We previously reported on how the bots were using AI to create scenes that were not real. The tweet screen captured to the right is just one of hundreds, if not more than hundreds, aimed by the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas sympathizers and bots trying to pull on our heartstrings, at the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians, and the children! to generate relief aid and, of course, hatred of the Jooooos. I have little doubt that, had ubiquitous cell phones and social media existed in 1944, there’d be people telling us that the Germans were surely defeated by the end of the year, and that we didn’t really need to cross into the Third Reich, killing more innocents, and that we should offer Adolf Hitler and his cronies a ceasefire, to avoid more tragedy.

And now, we’re getting something new. Several pro-Palestinian idiots from Palestine Action, a governmentally proscribed terrorist organization, in the United Kingdom staged a riot, attacking a weapons plant, which, in one instance had a rioter hitting a downed policewoman in the spine with a sledgehammer. The rioters are demanding to be released, but are being held on remand, being detained prior to trial. Eight of the prisoners have decided that a hunger strike would force His Majesty’s Government to release them, but they haven’t gotten their way, and the hunger strikers are now in the upper forties to fifty days of refusing to eat. Most are in rough physical shape right now, and could die at any time.

The left are whining about this, but the hunger strikers have chosen this course of action themselves. The left want the government to do something, but the only something the government could do is force-feed, or provide total parenteral nutrition, TPN, to provide nutrition intravenously, though I’d guess it wouldn’t be easy to get an IV line on these prisoners in their condition. The left are not advocating that; they only want the terrorists released.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is among those pushing this.

Of course, there’s plenty of conservative-leaning stuff on Twitter, and I follow several other accounts which aren’t political in the slightest.

I suspect that I get all of these tweets since I have responded to some of their silliness, because, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me, sometimes I just can’t shut up.

But that’s freedom of speech and of the press for you, and Mr Musk has been pretty good about allowing in to continue. I completely support the freedom of speech and of the press of the ‘Palestinian’ supporters, even though I believe their ’cause’ to be rubbish.

References

References
↑1 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
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Crazy People Are Dangerous: At least this guy is going to be locked up for a long, long time

The First Street Journal has previously reported on Kimbrady Carriker, the fine young gentleman who murdered five people in the City of Brotherly Love. Now, 2½ years later, we finally have a conviction in the case, and Mr Carriker actually might not spend the rest of his miserable life in prison.

Man who killed five people in the Kingsessing mass shooting pleads guilty, is sentenced to decades in prison

Kimbrady Carriker walked through Kingsessing dressed in body armor and armed with an AR-15-style rifle, then shot and killed five people at random on July 3, 2023.

by Ellie Rushing | Thursday, December 18, 2025 | 2:34 PM EST | Updated: 4:17 PM EST

The man who walked through the streets of Kingsessing and shot people at random in 2023, killing five and wounding five others in one of Philadelphia’s deadliest mass shootings, pleaded guilty Wednesday to multiple counts of murder and was sentenced to decades in prison.

Kimbrady Carriker, 43, admitted that on the evening of July 3, 2023, he calmly walked through a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood dressed in body armor and wearing a ski mask, and pointed his AR-15-style rifle at seemingly random passersby — then pulled the trigger.

What is an “AR-15-style rifle”? Was it an ArmaLite-15, or was it something else?

No, of course The Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t publish a photo of Mr Carriker, but instead had a five-picture montage of his victims. Mr Carriker has already pleaded guilty, so it’s not as though the newspaper has to somehow protect him prior to trial. But, of course, the most frequently circulate image of Mr Carriker on that internet thingy that Al Gore invented depicts him in drag, and, Heaven forfend! the newspaper wouldn’t want to have people jump to the conclusion that the transgendered are Just Plain Nuts.

There is nothing in reporter Ellie Rushing’s story to indicate that Mr Carriker was actually transgender or perhaps just an occasional cross-dresser; she does tell readers that his attorneys had prepared an insanity defense, and the District Attorney’s Office feared that he might actually be acquitted by reason of insanity. He is pretty much bonkers.

He killed five people: DaJuan Brown, 15; Lashyd Merritt, 21; Dymir Stanton, 29; Ralph Moralis, 59; and Joseph Wamah Jr., 31.

Five others were injured: a 13-year-old boy he shot multiple times in the legs, and a mother who was driving with her 2-year-old twins and 10-year-old niece when he fired more than a dozen bullets into her car.

Further down:

Prosecutors did not want to risk that a jury might find Carriker not guilty by reason of insanity, Wainwright said. So they offered Carriker the opportunity to plead guilty to five counts of third-degree murder, five counts of attempted murder, and gun crimes. They asked a judge to sentence him to 37½ to 75 years in prison.

Mr Carriker is 43 years old, and he’s already spent 2½ years in custody. In theory, he would be eligible for release when he is 78 years old. He should never see the outside of prison walls.

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The journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ralph Cipriano of Big Trial Blog sent out the message to the left on Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — stating that The Philadelphia Inquirer scrubbed the story about Paul George, one of the George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney Larry Krasner’s top minions, being disbarred from the federal court system.

Since we had already noted the newspaper’s article in a previous story, it was easy for me to check: the cited article remains available . . . but only if you know where to look. The newspaper has a Crime & Justice section, and if you type that in — the section does not appear linked on the website main page this morning, though it does occasionally — your will find the story listed, but not near the top. As of 9:00 AM EST on Sunday morning, there are five stories at the top of the Crime & Justice page, with a single column list of other article below that. The story on Messrs Krasner and George is the fifth one down on that list.

A site search of the newspaper’s website for “Krasner” brings up the story, the second story listed as of 9:06 AM EST. A site search for “Paul George” yields the story as well, seven stories down the list, but with the Philadelphia 76ers having a player with the same name, it’s unsurprising that the story about the Assistant District Attorney is down the list a bit.

We have noted the journolism — not a typographical error, but deliberate as seen in the image to the right — of The Philadelphia Inquirer previously. We reported recently on how the newspaper chose not to cover the felony arrests of eight “youth football players” in Polk County, Florida, reported both nationally and, in the Philadelphia media market by WPVI-TV, the ABC affiliate on Channel 6, as well as Chennel 10, the NBC affiliate, but the Inquirer chose to ignore a Philadelphia story. Website searches for “Thoroughbreds“, “youth football“, “Polk County“, “Davenport“, the town in which the arrests occurred, and “Grady Judd” conducted earlier and then reconducted as this article was being written turned up nothing on the story. The editors of the newspaper simply chose to ignore a story that they couldn’t have missed.

This is what my $6.99 per week digital subscription delivers? News censored by the political correctness and “anti racist news organization” publisher Elizabeth Hughes and the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism mandated for our nation’s third oldest continuously published newspaper?

As much as our credentialed media denigrate and hate Twitter since Elon Musk bought it and removed most of the constraints and censorship — the left really do hate freedom of speech and of the press — without Twitter I would never have heard of the Polk County case, and if I had missed logging into the newspaper’s website on the 11th, I’d have missed the story about Messrs Krasner’s and George’s utter failures.

The Inquirer’s masthead, in 1955, proclaimed the newspaper to be a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. These days, I’d suggest that they should use the logo I created to the left, because that’s what they publish.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board Attacks 77,302,580 Good American Voters Didn't you know? We "enabled" President Trump to fight crime, illegal immigration, and drug smuggling!

It was a couple of months ago that my good friend Daniel Pearson told me that he no longer wrote the majority of the unsigned editorials for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and in some ways, this doesn’t look like his work, but more like Will Bunch’s, though I certainly cannot say with actual knowledge that Mr Bunch wrote it.

The Editorial Board of our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, which hates President Trump with a white-hot passion, recently raised my subscription from $5.49 per week, $285.48 per year to $6.99 per week, $363.48 per year, but nevertheless declined to cover the story of eight Philly ‘youth football players‘ being arrested for felony retail theft in Polk County, Florida, an obviously Philadelphia story which made the national news as well as 6ABC and NBC Channel 10 locally, has declared Mr Trump “unredeemable,” and is now going after “his enablers.” That would include 144,311 people in Philadelphia[1]Absent Philadelphia, Donald Trump won 3,398,997 votes, 53.66%, to Kamala Harris Emhoff’s 2,854,471, or 45.06% of the total vote., 3,543,308 in all of Pennsylvania, and 77,302,580 of us nationwide.

Trump is unredeemable. What about his enablers? | Editorial

The collective cowardice of those who support the president despite their better judgment has damaged the United States and forever stained each individual’s place in history.

by The Editorial Board | Saturday, December 13, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

By now, it is beyond obvious that Donald Trump is unredeemable.

Trump assumed the Oval Office in 2016 as the most inexperienced, untruthful, and unstable president in modern history, if not ever. He has only grown worse.

When I see that the editorial writer was citing Politico and The Guardian, yeah, I suspect that it was the distinguished Mr Bunch who wrote it. But it’s interesting that the newspaper, which supported then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff in the 2024 election, would talk about ‘inexperience,’ when Mr Trump had four years of experience actually being President before the 2024 election, while Mrs Emhoff, though not specifically called “border tsar” by President Joe Biden, helped preside over a virtually open border policy, something which certainly helped our 45th President become our 47th President.

This past year, Trump has been a one-man wrecking ball, attacking norms, institutions, public health, higher education, the rule of law, and the Constitution. Never before has a president led such a relentless assault on the United States and its allies, while cozying up to dictators.

Trump has literally waged war at home and abroad, sending federal troops into cities, deporting thousands of immigrants without due process, and murdering alleged drug runners without providing any evidence.

Citing The Nation and Citizens for Ethics? 🙂

But this is where the Editorial Board don’t quite get it. Our good friends on the left kept telling us, ad infinitum, that the 2024 election was a huge call to protect democracy, and in taking their democratic choices, 77,302,580 of us chose, democratically, to have a President who would take a wrecking ball to the old way of doing things, to “drain the swamp” of the federal bureaucracy, and to expose and end things like Somali immigrants defrauding Minnesota’s social services system of hundreds of millions, if not over a billion dollars, a story so important that columnist Jenice Armstrong had to cite a New York Times story on it, because the Inquirer did not.[2]A site search for Somali, conducted at 11:32 AM EST on Saturday, December 13th failed to turn up a story, though it listed several articles, including opinion columns, about President Trump’s … Continue reading It was our democratic choice to have the 47th President actually enforce our immigration laws, the laws our good friends on the left, including our 46th President, told us no one was above, or at least that was what they told us when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail.

The Board continued, trashing people like Senators Dave McCormick and John Fetterman, a Democrat, as well as Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday, and “dozens” of Republican officeholders in Washington and Harrisburg. But aren’t the Republicans and a very few Democrats following the results of the 2024 election that was supposed to be a referendum on democracy following the democratic choices of the American voters? We voted for peace, we voted to reduce or eliminate our country’s involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War, while Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin continually advocates greater involvement, though at least she hasn’t pushed for sending American troops there.

In a move reminiscent of the FBI’s investigation of “radical traditionalist Catholics“, the Board even attacked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s traditional Christian tattoos.

The editorial writer concluded:

One day, Trump will be gone — but his enablers will have to answer for the damage they helped to wreak.

Damage? What damage? The Editorial Board have been fighting against greater law enforcement against street crimes, against enforcing our immigration laws, against interdicting drug smugglers, against fighting welfare fraud, and against the rights of real women. There are 77,302,580 of us who are very proud of having enabled President Trump’s efforts to return America to normal people!

References

References
↑1 Absent Philadelphia, Donald Trump won 3,398,997 votes, 53.66%, to Kamala Harris Emhoff’s 2,854,471, or 45.06% of the total vote.
↑2 A site search for Somali, conducted at 11:32 AM EST on Saturday, December 13th failed to turn up a story, though it listed several articles, including opinion columns, about President Trump’s reaction to it.