Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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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.
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“No one is above the law.” — Joe Biden Unless, of course, it's immigration law, and then our good friends on the left support breaking the law!

We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But now, it seems that Mr Bunch has changed his tune. To him, some people clearly are above the law, those people being ones who have violated our immigration laws:

In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution

Everyday folks are rising up to resist immigration raids with whistles, car chases, and noisy protests. Revolution is in the air.

By Will Bunch | Pearl harbor Day, December 7, 2025 | 2:24 PM EST

NEW ORLEANS — In a city of frayed nerves over an invasion by more than 200 masked, tactical-gear-wearing federal immigration agents, a chaotic scene suddenly broke out right in front of the altar at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome.

There follow several paragraphs noting that this was not the real thing, but a rehearsal for activists to disrupt actual immigration law enforcement.

This was a play-acting, casual-dress rehearsal during an emergency training session organized by the immigration-rights group Union Migrante. The activists were planting more seeds for what is rapidly sprouting as the most important American uprising of the 21st century.

It took about 66 hours to go from basic training to frontline action. On Friday afternoon, in a heavily Latino neighborhood near the New Orleans airport, the cartoon-villainous, strutting Border Patrol commander of the Louisiana immigration raids named “Catahoula Crunch,” Greg Bovino, struggled to conduct a sweep through blocks of low-slung apartments.

Word that Bovino and his masked secret police were in suburban Kenner spread quickly on a series of chat groups of activists who’ve played cat-and-mouse with his agents ever since their op began Wednesday, tailing government SUVs across superstore parking lots and down boulevards lined with strip malls.

Eventually, according to the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, the caravan of citizen resisters following the agents grew to as many as 30 vehicles, until Bovino-friendly cops from the Kenner Police Department formed a blockade to stop them. That didn’t deter other neighbors who, as captured on video, chased the masked feds across lawns while filming with cell phones and blowing shrill whistles, a signal for immigrants to stay indoors.

In other words, the activists were attempting to disrupt and interfere with a legitimate immigration law enforcement action. Some people apparently are above the law!

You can feel the sheltering impulses of the antebellum Underground Railroad, combined with the righteous fervor of 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer. I spent much of last week in and around New Orleans, the resiliently rebellious heart of one of America’s reddest states. I watched everyday folks protest on street corners, create “Know Your Rights” pamphlets, and learn how to legally confront masked, armed law-enforcement officers. Nearing the end of a year that began with the grim inauguration of authoritarianism, I left here convinced I’d seen the green shoots of a second American Revolution.

Heaven forfend! “(A) second American Revolution”? I suppose that Mr Bunch would be in favor of anything that might get rid of our freely and legally elected President, but revolutions frequently do not turn out quite the way people expected. Our first, and hopefully only, American Revolution brought forth a nation of individual rights, freedom, and democracy, but most recent revolutions have produced authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and dictatorship. Remember: our previous President tried to impose mandatory administration of a vaccine approved only on an emergency basis, pushed social media such as (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter and Facebook to censor posts the Administration didn’t like, and tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board. Even The Grey Lady, our nation’s most famous newspaper, The New York Times, was giving OpEd space to those who wanted to restrict Other People’s — certainly not their own! — Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

However, I followed Mr Bunch’s link to the Times-Picayune, and found something somewhat different than the Inquirer columnist told his readers:

In Kenner, Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino faces mixed reactions and police backup

By Lara Nicholson, Staff writer | Friday, December 5, 2025

As the U.S. Border Patrol conducted their third day of immigration raids in the New Orleans area, Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, the agency’s leader, toured the streets of Kenner Friday to mixed reaction from the public, taking photo ops at one point to fielding protesters at another before ultimately using a Kenner Police blockade to leave the area.

Bovino and a team of at least six agents conducted operations at gas stations and in neighborhoods along Williams Boulevard, the main corridor of the city lined with Latin American restaurants and department stores. At one point Bovino’s team approached a vehicle at a gas station to question a passenger before letting him go. It’s unclear if they detained anyone on Friday.

Bovino and his entourage wore green uniforms and face coverings, and he dismissed a request Friday from New Orleans Mayor-Elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat, that federal agents remove masks as part of a broader demand for more transparency.

“I think this is about as transparent as it gets right here,” Bovino told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in response to Moreno’s demands.

But in Kenner, a suburban city of about 65,000, the political landscape is much different from its more progressive anchor. While having the largest Hispanic population per capita of any Louisiana city at 30%, its government is almost entirely Republican. Its police chief, Keith Conley, has in recent years complained about the increase in undocumented immigrants and is one of the only officials in the parish that’s been a vocal supporter of Border Patrol’s efforts in the city.

While New Orleans/Orleans Parish, the murder capital of the United States, gave 130,749 votes, or 82.16%, to then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and only 24,119, 15.16%, to then-former and now current President Donald Trump, Mr Trump carried Jefferson Parish, in which Kenner is the largest city, 98,810, or 55.45%, to 75,731, 42.50%, for Mrs Emhoff. Overall, Mr Trump carried Louisiana 1,208,505, 60.22%, to 766,870, 38.21%. Note that Mr Bunch reported that the activists were training at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome, in New Orleans itself; the activists protesting in Kenner were mostly not from Kenner.

The Times-Picayune again:

At a Star Gas Station on Williams Boulevard where Bovino’s team stopped for a break, customers asked to take pictures with him while he waited to purchase pork cracklins and an energy drink. He offered to buy one of them their coke while a gaggle of photojournalists took pictures.

In the parking lot outside, a man in a camouflage jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” hat held up a makeshift metal sign saying “THANK YOU I.C.E ❤︎ U D.H.S. U.S.A!” in blue paint.

“We love you and we work for you,” Bovino told the man before entering his SUV.

Our frantic Philadelphian somehow didn’t include that in his column; perhaps he didn’t actually read all of the news report he cited?

Freed of the old constraint of 750 words, Mr Bunch continued, but if you read it, you’ll see that he was reporting on ‘resistance’ from New Orleans, which even he noted was but a “Democratic dot in a state that Trump won with 60% of the vote in 2024.”

One last bit from him:

In Charlotte, the Bovino-led operation dubbed “Charlotte’s Web,” which was also met with widespread community opposition, was abruptly cut short after just four-and-a-half days.

As my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter William Teach reported Monday morning, a previously, 2018 under President Trump, deported illegal immigrant who sneaked back in in 2021, under President Biden, was just arrested for stabbing a man in the chest on Charlotte’s light rail system, the same public transportation system in which Decarlos Brown — not an illegal immigrant, but a mentally ill man with dozens of previous arrests — (allegedly) murdered Iryna Zarutska.

Perhaps Mr Bunch never heard of the murder of Miss Zarutska, given that a site search of the Inquirer’s website foe “Iryna Zarutska” turned up zero results. Had Mr Brown been white and Miss Zarutska black or Hispanic, you can bet your last euro that it would have been all over the Inky.

Perhaps if our friends on the left in general, and Mr Bunch specifically, included our immigration laws and street crime under “no one is above the law” we’d have a safer society.
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Journolism: CEO of Lenfest Institute for Journalism worries about Freedom of the Press when his own newspaper censors the news "What does not get printed is as important as what does" Jim Friedlich told us, but The Philadelphia Inquirer frequently doesn't print the politically incorrect

Jim Friedlich is Chief Executive Officer and executive director of the Leftist, oops, sorry, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns what I have sometimes called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.. In this morning’s newspaper, he is “Giving thanks — and offering up a prayer — for America’s free press: On this, more than any Thanksgiving in memory, a free and independent American press seems in peril.” It’s mostly boilerplate stuff, such as claiming that President Trump’s attempt to eliminate the Voice of America as somehow an attack on freedom of the Press, as though VOA is somehow not a government body rather than an independent news source. He decries the defunding of the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, even though both still exist and can survive the way every other broadcaster survives, by selling advertising.

But this is the line which attracted most of my attention:

What does not get printed is as important as what does. The palpable chill of partisan press criticism has meant the self-censorship of even some of the nation’s wealthiest newspaper owners.

“What does not get printed”? Such as the censorship and self-censorship of virtually every outlet among the credentialed media of then-President Joe Biden’s visibly declining mental status? Remember our coverage of Jake Tapper‘s and Alex Thompson‘s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again? Only a fool would believe that the major television news networks, that the reporters of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times didn’t see the President’s slips, falls, gaffes, and zoning out. That it was visible to all who paid attention is attested to by conservatives having seen it and publishing it and tweeting it out, but, alas! the credentialed media pooh-poohed all of that, and told their readership and audiences that it was nothing, that maybe Mr Biden had lost a step physically but mentally he was, according to Mary Peltola, “one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in DC.” That was just before the disastrous debate on June 27, 2024. After the debate, the Associated Press tried to tell us that Mr Biden was “Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful,” but most of the media admitted that his debate performance was a disaster, and, worst of all, the American public saw it, in ways the credentialed media couldn’t cover up.

I asked the Inquirer’s Will Bunch, on Bluesky, if there was “any discussion in the newsroom concerning Mr Biden’s growing incapacity before it all blew up during the debate?” but of course I didn’t get a response.

It’s simple: to the credentialed media, President Biden was running for re-election, and nothing, nothing! was more important than defeating the evil Donald Trump. And Mr Friedlich’s newspaper was definitely in the forefront of that effort: following the debate, the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” to which the Editorial Board of the Inquirer replied, “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.”

So, Mr Friedlich, I had to laugh when you wrote what does not get printed is as important as what does. Your own newspaper chose not to report on the mental condition of the 46th President of the United States, at the time it was most important, when he was running for re-election, but Mr Bunch keeps crying that Mr “Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state remains mostly off-limits for the elite media. It’s a massive error of omission that the world will look back on and regret.” Perhaps the Lenfest Institute for Journalism needs to push the newspaper to actually engage in journalism.

References

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↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Kristallnacht in New York City? It’s not so far-fetched! As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

This site noted, on Friday, how self-proclaimed ‘imam’ and ‘Islamic scholar’ Abdullah Mady led a walkout of about 100 attendees at an interfaith service at the City University of New York because there was a ‘Zionist’ there.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch apologizes to famed synagogue’s congregants for botched response to antisemitic protest

By Rich Calder | Saturday, November 22, 2025 | 4:53 PM EST

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch issued a heartfelt apology to the congregation of an historic Manhattan synagogue Saturday — conceding cops should have done a better job of keeping away hateful anti-Israel protesters.

Tisch told a crowd of 150 congregants attending service at Park East Synagogue that this week’s protests are legally allowed outside houses of worship — no matter how vile the topic — but said the NYPD failed to keep the front entrance clear and ensure “people could easily enter and leave shul.

“That is where we fell short, and for that, I apologize to this congregation,” the 44-year-old top cop said during a 10-minute speech which drew a standing ovation.

“Our plan didn’t include a frozen zone at the entrance. As a result, the space right outside your steps was chaotic.”

This story makes me appreciate the recently ended television series Blue Bloods and sadly fictitious Police Commissioner Frank Reagan.

Some 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Manhattan synagogue and heckled Jews attending an event by Nefesh B’nefesh, a Zionist organization that helps Jews immigrate from North America to Israel.

Many chanted “Globalize the intifada” and sinisterly urged the “resistance” to “take another settler out.”

Internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

Can someone tell me how such chant would not be seen as direct threats by the attendees? That was the direct intention of at least some of the protesters:

“It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events,” one protest leader told the crowd.

“We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared,” the agitator repeated emphatically.

The crowd also chanted “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada” to the beat of a drum.

“Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out,” the hate-filled group chanted at one point, video shows.

It’s not as though the NYPD did not have advance warning about the protest, as we reported last Wednesday.

Counter protestors were also on the scene, calling the masked demonstrators “cowards” and “pussies” for not showing their faces.

Cops set up metal barricades to keep protestor at bay, but some of the barricades were left too close to the synagogue entrance – putting event attendees coming and going in potential risk.

Pal-Awda NY/NJ, the anti-Israel activist group leading the protest, said it was demonstrating against an effort to “recruit American settlers to illegally occupy stolen Palestinian land.”

Again, internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

I find it amusing that Pal-Awda is whining about “stolen Palestinian land” while living on what some of our friends on the far-left call stolen Indian indigenous land.” They don’t want American Jews to immigrate to Israel, but they also try to make life miserable for Jews who live in the United States.

Oddly enough, of the four women most visibly protesting the Jews, three looked like very white Americans.

American Jews, in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, are learning the hard way, as have their brothers in the Holy Land, that such virulent anti-Semitism has to be resisted from the very beginning. The history of Nazi Germany, and of Kristallnacht, has demonstrated for Jews the dangers of hoping that anti-Semitism just disappears, just goes away.

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Kristallnacht in New York City? It’s not so far-fetched! As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

The hatred for the Jews continues in New York City. Whether they were encouraged by the election of Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s next mayor is speculative, but it certainly seems probable. They don’t want American Jews to emigrate to Israel, calling them “settler colonialists,” but they also try to make life miserable for Jews in the United States.

From The Times of Israel:

Anti-Zionist groups announce protest outside Manhattan synagogue

By Luke Tress | Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Anti-Zionist groups announce a protest for tomorrow at New York City’s Park East Synagogue.

The protesters are demonstrating against an event at the synagogue hosted by Nefesh B’nefesh, an organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.

Internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

“No settlers on stolen land,” say advertisements for the protest on social media, branding the event a “settler recruiting fair.”

Nefesh B’nefesh does not direct immigrants to settlements; anti-Zionist activists often brand all Jewish Israelis as “settlers.”

Yet the protesting groups are here, in the United States, in New York City, which is land taken from the Indians by our settler colonialist ancestors.

The protest is led by the Pal-Awda activist group and is shared by other anti-Zionist organizations such as the city’s branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, Writers Against the War on Gaza, student groups from around the city and individual activists with large followings.

Pal-Awda is a group calling for the so-called “right of return” for Palestinians to lands within Israel proper, the same excuse given by Yassir Arafat for rejecting the 2001 initiative by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to create a ‘Palestinian’ state in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Like so many of the irredentists, they want their “From the River To the Sea” ‘Palestine,’ with the Jews expelled . . . or just plain slaughtered.

The hyperlinks were not in the original, but were added by us.

The National Lawyers Guild, a nonprofit, sent an email to its members asking for volunteer legal observers to attend the event. The observers serve to provide legal defense for protesters against police. The guild is anti-Israel and put out a statement in support of the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, the day after it happened.

The image to the left was attached to the National Lawyers Guild statement.

Who are the “National Lawyers Guild”? They are just another leftist ‘progressive’ group who hate the United States — despite being headquartered here — as they tell us in their About Us page. But one wonders: did these oh-so-progressive people, saying that they “actively educate, litigate, and truth-seek toward the end of social justice,” and “reaffirming the legitimacy of the struggle of people for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle,” mean to include the rape, murder, and kidnapping of unarmed people, including children?

Their statement was issued on October 8, 2023, the day after the massacre of 1,199 innocent people and the kidnapping of 251 others.  The numbers hadn’t firmed up on that next day, but The New York Times had several different stories on the attack dated on the seventh. The “National Lawyers Guild” cannot have been unaware of just what the attackers had done. And, of course, they chose to post their support for the ‘Palestinians’ before the Israel Defense Forces had moved into Gaza to respond to the Hamas attack

There have been thousands of anti-Israel protests in New York City since the Hamas attack, the NYPD has said.

Demonstrations outside synagogues and in heavily Jewish neighborhoods are rare, but tend to be especially vitriolic. Park East is a prominent synagogue in an area with a large Jewish population.

Yup, anti-Semitism. These fine people could have held their protests anywhere, but they chose to protest in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, around the synagogues which are the most visible symbols of Judaism. They deliberately chose locations to try to intimidate Jewish Americans.

As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

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The death of the Lexington Herald-Leader?

I have written previously about the death of the Lexington Herald-Leader, a newspaper which is near and dear to my heart. I not only delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in the late 1960s — yes, I’m that old! — but my sadly late best friend Ken Vermillion and I had several articles published in the paper in the mid 1970s. I noted the change in home delivery of the print edition to just three days a week, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, though the Sunday edition will be delivered on Saturday, by the United States Postal Service. Executive Editor and General Manager Richard A Green wrote, on May 31, 2024:

Beginning Aug. 5, we will transition to a 24/7 digital product with three days of high-quality, locally focused print editions a week.

Perhaps I have misunderstood what Mr Green meant, but I thought he was saying that the “24/7 digital product” would include the “high-quality, locally focused” product as well, not that the print editions would be the exclusively “high-quality, locally focused” publications.

I found this, first in my national feed, this morning:

Kentucky volleyball is just two wins away from total SEC perfection

Kentucky volleyball nears perfect SEC Season, eyes #1 NCAA seed

By Drew Holbrook | Monday, November 10, 2025

Craig Skinner doesn’t run from challenges, he hunts them. And once again, Kentucky Volleyball has answered the call.

Despite two early-season losses (both to ranked teams, including one to number 1 Nebraska), the Wildcats have run roughshod through the SEC, stacking ranked win after ranked win while climbing into the national top two. The schedule has been brutal. The response has been elite. Kentucky volleyball is nearing perfection.

You can follow the embedded link to read the rest of the story, but Kentucky has won all thirteen Southeastern Conference volleyball matches played, and has lost only seven sets in those thirteen matches. UK recently beat then #2 Texas 3-0, on the road. But you wouldn’t know it is your news source is the Herald-Leader! UK just beat #19 Tennessee 3-1, in Memorial Coliseum, a venue only a few miles from the newspaper’s offices

I informed Mr Green via a directly addressed tweet, something he should have seen anyway, since he follows me on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — as I had on November 5th, following the victory over Texas.

What Mr Vermillion used to call the Herald-Liberal maintains a specific UK Sports page on its website, which shows 24 stories as of 8:24 AM EST on Tuesday. Naturally, most are about the University’s football and men’s basketball teams, though there are a couple on women’s basketball, but somehow not a single story on a legitimate contender for the NCAA championship.

Perhaps this has something to do with yet further cutbacks at McClatchy, which owns the Lexington newspaper. Editor & Publisher reported on McClatchy’s “quiet cuts”:

On Monday (November 3, 2025) morning, staffers across McClatchy’s real-time news desk received an unexpected invitation to a hastily arranged Zoom meeting at noon. The calendar invite was vague, referring only in general terms to a restructuring update. The team wasn’t too taken aback by it; they knew change was coming. But they didn’t anticipate what awaited them when they logged on.

When the journalists on the nearly two dozen-strong team joined the call, they were hit with stunning news: McClatchy was eliminating the entire real-time news operation, which effectively operated as its national breaking news desk. The announcement left the team reeling. Their employment, they were told, would end on November 14.

Upon reading this, I checked to see if Mr Green was still the Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, and he was still listed as such, at least as of the October 17, 2025 update to their About Us page.

The Columbia Journalism Review reported on staff cuts at McClatchy, as well as recent layoffs at CBS News, NBC News, Axios, and Teen Vogue, but the stress point of that story was the end of DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — and that many of the layoffs and job losses were among people who were not white males.

The newspaper did cover UK’s last volleyball NCAA championship, in 2020.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Herald-Leader, and for newspapers in general, because I much prefer to read the news than try to watch it on television. But if the Lexington newspaper, which has long specialized in UK sports, can’t cover a potential national championship team, I have to wonder just how much longer it can last. Newspapers cannot increase their sales by cutting back on the quantity and quality of their reporting.