Who Really Owns Twitter?

Twitter’s CEO is abusing investors’ positions to maintain his lock on compensation and further his social justice crusade.

by Adam Mill for American Greatness

Last week I purchased approximately $4,500 in Twitter common stock. Public reports indicated Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk might soon use his own money either to buy Twitter outright or to gain a controlling stake in the company so he might stop Twitter’s censorship. I bought at approximately $45, well below the $54.20 per share Musk offered. Twitter doesn’t pay a dividend and it loses $0.29 per share. If shareholders are to see any return on investment from Twitter’s $1.5 billion in annual revenue, it has to come through share appreciation.

Twitter stock has increased from around $20 per share to around $45 per share over a five year period. That sounds pretty good until you consider Twitter hit $44.49 in mid-2018. The stock spiked again in 2021 to around $77 but crashed back to earth at $33.39 earlier this year. Only by timing the market could a shareholder make money over the last several years. 

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, on the other hand, has found the company to be reliably profitable. He received $30.35 million in compensation in 2021, which included a month off. While Agrawal has not made any money for his investors, he’s savaged Twitter’s nonconforming users. A normal business would try to recruit and build its user base. Agrawal, instead, has unleashed a wave of bans and censorship to please the woke. In January 2021, Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump from the platform. Many of his fans and followers soon followed. 

Twitter has engaged in some pretty underhanded behavior. It famously censored the Biden laptop story which connected candidate Joe Biden to corrupt foreign payments for influence. Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) now claims that the FBI fed Twitter what it knew to be false information that the laptop was a Russian hoax. Twitter also colluded with other tech giants to censor the story from reaching voters ahead of the election. The Federal Election Commission blessed this election interference a year later because it hurt the “Bad Orange Man.” Has Twitter done any of this for the benefit of the shareholders? It does not appear so.

It wasn’t that long ago that news media organizations dismissed charges of political partisanship as conspiracy theories. Under normal conditions, competitor news organizations would not stake a position opposing the possibility of Twitter charting a new course away from censorship. Now they openly express alarm that a member of the conspiracy of partisanship might leave the fold. 

The mainstream press has published countless editorials and opinion pieces masquerading as news stories trying to influence public opinion to oppose Musk’s bid. Former Reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao offers fascinating insight into the authoritarians who demand thought conformity. In the newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, Pao writes, “Musk’s appointment to Twitter’s board shows that we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.” 

Moreover, Pao argues we need government content regulations or else “people will continue to be harmed. The people harmed will disproportionately be those who have been harmed for centuries—women and members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The people who benefit from unrestricted amplification of their views will also be the same people who have benefited from that privilege for centuries.”

What a load of authoritarian doublespeak. Pao just wants to continue the practice of accusing every political opponent of “racism” to justify censorship. We’ve all seen examples of “community guidelines” being used as weapons in the hands of the Left. Pao wants her side to keep this power over speech so it may continue to bully and intimidate her political opponents. She openly calls for a world “safe” from offensive speech.

Twitter is supposed to be a private company. And it’s supposed to be owned by its shareholders who have a right to expect the board to pursue policies that make them money. Twitter is not making money for its investors. Its social justice agenda drives away users and loses money. Musk just offered to buy out the long-abused investors in order to liberate the business from the unprofitable practices of the woke C-suite. This is a microcosm of the modern corporate woke problem that allows social justice warriors to pursue personal agendas at the expense of other people’s money.

Instead of protecting our interests, and without asking its owners, Twitter’s board acted according to the whims of Agrawal. Of course Agrawal wants to keep his power and obscene compensation. So in order to protect his sweet deal, the Board voted for a “poison pill,” which will cause shareholders to lose even more money.

The board was pretty open about its objective to block shareholders like me from Musk’s generous buyout offer. If Musk accumulates more than 15 percent of the company, Twitter will attack the value of my shares by flooding the market with new shares. According to the plan, the board will allow existing shareholders (excluding Musk) “to purchase, at the then-current exercise price, additional shares of common stock having a then-current market value of twice the exercise price of the right.” 

In other words, if I want to maintain my share of ownership (small as it is), I would need to fork over enough money to proportionally match all the other buyers opposing Musk’s bid. What do I get for sinking more money into my Twitter investment? I simply retain the value I now have. Put simply, Twitter is forcing me to lose money to prevent Musk from making me money.

Agrawal should not be able to abuse investors’ positions to maintain his lock on compensation and further his social justice crusade. If he wants to control Twitter at the expense of the owners, he should have to pay us for our shares. He’s the one making the money from Twitter, not the investors. That needs to stop. The bidding starts at $54.20. Can you beat that, Mr. Agrawal? If not, let us sell our shares to Musk.

X22, On the Frings, and more-April 19

 

2 words that trigger every liberal: Family Friendly. Why? They know what those 2 words mean, and they hate them. Their own version of 'family friendly' involves their twisted agendas that have nothing to do with being 'family' or friendly. Which is why they get so triggered whenever they hear the real version of 'family friendly' being tossed around anywhere, because it doesn't fit their hateful agendas. Long story short: Today's huge GAC Family news has the hateful bigots of the internet (most of whom have probably never even seen a Hallmark movie or ever heard of CCB!) getting their panties in a twist! 🤣

Also, today was the last day of filming Season 13 of NCIS LA (Glory be!!). Crossing fingers that a surprise Hetty scene was filmed today!

Here's tonight's news:

‘Genocide’ Is Not a Throwaway Term of Abuse

Joe Biden’s thoughtless, casual, and inflated rhetoric is taking America to the brink of war.

by Nicholas L. Waddy for American Greatness

Soaring inflation is leaving Americans battered and bruised—and not just inflation in prices. Inflation in rhetoric is also doing a number on the people of our republic.

We’ve seen it unfold with depressing regularity. Donald Trump was a “fascist dictator,” we were told. The Capitol riot was a “coup” and an “insurrection.” Climate change poses an “existential threat” to all life on earth. And, just this past week, after failing to get the legislative redistricting map he wanted from the state Supreme Court, Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers declared: “At a time when our democracy is under near-constant attack, the judiciary has abandoned our democracy in our most dire hour.” 

Deary me! If you are a regular viewer of the nonstop apocalypt-o-rama on CNN and MSNBC these days, you are likely to think American democracy is being struck with death blows more or less every hour of every day.

Such hyperbolic, scaremongering rhetoric is bad enough when it’s used in the context of our toxic domestic politics, but when the same loose, inflammatory talk is injected into the practice of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy, the stakes rise inexorably—as do the dangers.

A case in point: last week, Joe Biden accused Russia of committing “genocide” in Ukraine. He did so offhandedly, clumsily, and inarticulately, of course, but he did it all the same. After a brief mention in a speech about inflation, he clarified his position to reporters: “Yes, I called it genocide . . . It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” Not for the first time, therefore, Biden thrust himself way out in front of his own administration, which has not accused Russia of genocide. 

The reasons for declining to make that accusation are easy enough to see. In the first place, Russia is not guilty of genocide in Ukraine and, moreover, charging a country with genocide traditionally has implied a moral and political imperative to intervene directly to stop the killing. U.S. and/or NATO intervention in Ukraine, however, would bring with it extremely high risks, including the likelihood of sparking World War III and a nuclear holocaust.

Why do I say that Russia is not guilty of genocide? Simple: Although Russia has killed thousands of civilians in Ukraine, and may well have committed war crimes, those two things by themselves don’t add up to  “genocide.” 

Genocide is the attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic group, and, frankly, if what’s taking place in Ukraine now is considered “genocide,” and the bar is henceforth to be set at any military campaign that kills thousands of civilians, then most of the wars that have been fought since 1945 were “genocides.” 

Indeed, by that standard, the United States itself has committed genocide on numerous occasions. This definition, then, is absurd. 

Genocide is the most extreme, most debased, most barbaric crime that any nation can commit, and the only reason the word is being bandied about by Ukrainian leaders, and, now, by the man in the White House, is its propagandistic effect. 

Not that facts matter to Joe Biden, but, as a matter of fact, a much stronger case could be made that China is guilty of genocide. Remember China? The country that, by its negligence and dishonesty, has killed more than 1 million Americans with a vicious, bioengineered disease? It’s the same country killing and enslaving Uyghurs on a scale vast enough that it appears intent on, well . . . wiping them out as an ethnic group. Oh yeah: it’s also the country that paid (indirectly, via Hunter Biden’s dirty dealings) for Sleepy Joe’s home improvements. So hey—forget I said anything. All is forgiven. 

Joking aside, not only has Joe Biden refused to punish China in any meaningful way for its tyrannical and genocidal policies, he’s actually excused those policies. Biden suggested they merely were the result of “different norms” in our two countries, and he bragged about his close relationship with China’s dictator, President Xi Jinping. Quite a contrast!

Biden gets things wrong more often than he gets things right, so his rhetorical blunder by itself is not surprising. What’s more worrying is that Biden might actually believe his own irresponsible rhetoric. He may really believe Russia is a genocidal, expansionist dictatorship—that there is no meaningful distinction between Putin and Adolf Hitler. If that is the case, Americans should reflect on the possible consequences of those beliefs, because they could be, quite literally, earth-shattering. 

When a nation commits genocide, a very strong argument can be made that all major powers are obligated to intervene to stop it. Imagine if Russia really was massacring Ukrainians en masse, perhaps herding them into death camps, and was determined to wipe them off the face of the earth. Does anyone believe the proper response to that horror would be . . . economic sanctions (excluding oil and gas, which most of the West thinks it can’t do without) and modest military aid (but no aircraft or heavy weapons) to the soon-to-be-obliterated? 

Genocide calls for direct military action. Genocide calls for war. That’s the implication of Biden’s inflated and inflammatory rhetoric: that virtually any action, no matter how extreme, could be justified to combat the unparalleled evil of Putinism.

Biden’s lack of messaging discipline is scary enough. Even scarier is that he believes his own nonsense and may want to do something about it. The trouble is, he can. He can attack Russia directly whenever he pleases. He might do so casually, thoughtlessly, impulsively, because that seems to be his modus operandi, but, once the trigger is pulled, it can’t be unpulled. 

If you thought the world was on the brink before, Sleepy Joe just made the situation that much worse. And we have three more years of his erratic leadership in store.

Make No Mistake, Cancel Culture Defines the Left

Make No Mistake, Cancel Culture Defines the Left

Featured is Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Bill Donohue

Technically speaking, censorship is something that only the government can do: it has the power to stop speech before it is uttered and prohibit the distribution of the written word. In a free society, such instances must be limited and well defined. For the most part, our society has done a pretty good job in ensuring freedom of speech.

Today we are faced with a cancel culture, a condition whereby some controversial ideas are being cancelled; in effect, they are being censored. But the censor is not government: it is the private sector. The social media corporations — Facebook, Google, Twitter — are the major culprits. These Silicon Valley behemoths are not interested in cancelling all controversial ideas, simply the ones they dislike.

The social media ruling class is not made up of liberals; they are leftists. That's the difference between a moderate (liberal) and a radical (leftist). As such, they don't believe in freedom of speech anymore than they believe in freedom of religion. To say they are a threat to our society is an understatement.

If it were the reverse — if speech that conservatives disliked was being cancelled by social media companies — it would be just as appalling. To be sure, the First Amendment provisions on speech and religion do not apply to the private sector; they are only limitations placed on the government. However, when the abuse of power exercised by private-sector titans is so overwhelming that legitimate views of a contrary nature cannot be expressed, then liberty is jeopardized. Facebook, Google, and Twitter need to be broken up by government. Meantime, I wish Elon Musk well.

The origins of the cancel culture are traceable to the campus, not Silicon Valley. The professoriate has long favored freedom of speech for some, but not for others. In other words, free speech for the Left, but none for conservatives.

Remember "Crossfire," the CNN show that featured nightly debates on current issues? It started with Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan, on the left and the right, respectively; Michael Kinsley and Robert Novak also hosted the show. Then there was "Hannity and Colmes" on Fox News. Neither exists anymore.

I mention this because I cut my teeth on these shows. When teaching at a college in Pittsburgh, I flew to D.C. on a regular basis to do "Crossfire," and when I came back home to New York in 1993 for this job, I continued to do the show. Three years later, Fox News was founded and I was a regular on many of the shows, including "Hannity and Colmes."

These types of shows did not die because of low ratings (a subsequent "Crossfire" was a flop, owing to attempts to tamp down the debates), but because liberals lost almost every round. If the Left was cleaning the clock of conservatives, the shows would still be on the air.

Before I left academia, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute arranged for me to debate scholars on a range of issues, in many colleges and universities. In some cases, students tried to shout me down. What was true then — it is even more true today — was the total absence of conservative students shouting down left-wing speakers. It never happens. It's always the Left that does the cancelling.

The Left is driven more by emotion and feelings than by reason: They are not persuaded by empirical evidence or logic. Yet they see themselves as creative thinkers. The good news is that while they may control the command centers in our culture, they don't own us — there is still an opportunity to push back. Most people have common sense, and more and more Americans are rallying to our side.

The Left knows that this analysis is true, which explains their penchant for censorship. They can't beat us in discourse, so their only weapon is to stop the discourse. They are a pitiful bunch.

The White House Sending Kamala Harris to Small Towns in Red States Is a Genius Political Move

streiff reporting for RedState 

The Democrats are facing a multitude of problems heading into the 2022 mid-term elections. Those problems are nothing like what they face in 2024. The Washington Post handicaps the potential Democrat candidates (see this post by my colleague Susie Moore, Even WaPo Isn’t Excited About the Dems’ 2024 Prospects), and the list they come up with looks like a cross between the Star Wars Cantina (Cory Booker? Pete Butttttigieg?) and leftovers from the Soviet Politburo.

As Susie notes, “the glummest notes are reserved for the two who should be the ‘most likely to’s’….”

No sane person thinks the dementia lollipop in the Oval Office will be allowed to run for a second term. Not only has he shown himself to be wildly incompetent and deeply corrupt; he is clearly on the waterpark slide heading to full-blown, custodial dementia. With Biden institutionalized, the logical frontrunner should be Kamala Harris. But as the Washington Post observes, things aren’t working out well for her.

• Vice President Kamala Harris (who, by the way, doesn’t even land in the top two) — “We’re dropping Harris down a slot this time. Being vice president is certainly a good launchpad, but it’s not at all clear Harris has put it to good use. Her numbers are similar to Biden’s, and she’s done little to change the perceptions that harmed her 2020 campaign, including on her ability to drive a message.”

Harris has a lot more problems than her “ability to drive a message” (is that what the kids are calling it these days?). Best-casing it, she’s a mid-wit poseur who got to where she is by a combination of using the race/gender card and riding Willie Brown. Call me a misogynistic troglodyte, but the facts speak for themselves. Her record in public life ranges from undistinguished at its apogee, to brutal and stupid at its low point. Here is Tulsi Gabbard figuratively setting Harris on fire and chasing her around the stage at one of the Democrat presidential primary debates.

Everything Harris has touched has turned to crap. President Biden put her in charge of the mess he created at our Southern Border. She’s been missing in action. As war raged in Ukraine, she was sent to represent our interests at a meeting with frontline ally Poland only to engage in bizarre and inappropriate laughter over the fate of Ukrainian refugees (Kamala Cackles and Goes Into More Confused Word Salad in Poland).

Her management style is a trainwreck. According to insiders, she doesn’t listen to briefings and blames staff for not adequately preparing her. She’s reputed to be a bully, and about a dozen senior staffers have bailed out of the dumpster fire she presides over. None of this indicates a major political talent waiting in the wings. As hard as it is to believe, she is less popular than Joe Biden.

As we are wrestling with a European war on the verge of spilling over into other countries, the dollar seems to be headed the way of the Weimar Reichsmark, and over a million illegals are projected to enter the nation this year; Kamala Harris is visiting Philadelphia to talk about mask mandates and Sunset, Louisiana, to tout Biden’s record on high-speed internet.

None of this is a sign of Biden’s team trying to keep a gaffe-prone loose cannon out of public sight. No, according to Politico, this is part of a clever strategy to burnish Harris’ image: Kamala Harris keeps traveling to unconventional places. Here’s why.

In early April, a month after a trip to Poland and in between making dozens of calls to senators to push the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Vice President Kamala Harris took a day trip to, of all places, Greenville, Mississippi.

A rural town of 30,000 along the Mississippi River is not your stereotypical stop for a national Democrat, let alone one serving as the second most powerful politician in the country. But Harris had, nevertheless, traveled there that day as part of an effort to talk about small businesses and community lending programs.

…

The swing to Greenville is part of an under noticed strategy for the VP’s office, one in which she’s homed her focus on the ways in which administration policy is intersecting with overlooked communities. It’s brought her to other far-off, non-traditional locales, including a recent swing to Sunset, Louisiana, a rural town of fewer than 3,000 people, to tout the administration’s work expanding rural broadband. And it’s manifested itself in the ways in which she’s approached some of the White House’s big-ticket items.

Weeks after the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed into law, Harris convened a briefing with administration officials to go over the part of the bill related to charging stations for electric vehicles — an interest that had animated her dating back to her time in California politics. As staff went from page to page of the briefing document, she peppered them with questions. How would 500,000 charging stations be built and distributed? Who would build them? What would it mean for overlooked communities?

“[She said] ‘Talk to me about a community that has been left behind, a rural community. Where are they going to go? How are they going to get put there?” Mitch Landrieu, senior adviser to the president, recounted to POLITICO. “Now talk to me about an urban neighborhood that has been left behind where people are renting.’”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but “left behind” communities have bigger fish to fry than sweating out the allocation of charging stations for rich people’s cars.

Vice presidential historian Joel K. Goldstein says Harris’ approach could help her turn the corner on how she’s perceived in the press and across the country. “It’s part of sort of strengthening the perception so that six months from now, people are writing stories about how effective she’s being internally rather than why is her staff leaving,” Goldstein told POLITICO.

Actually, they aren’t.

Everyone, the public, the Biden White House, the Democrat party, and even the Beltway media, realize that Kamala Harris is way out of her depth and is a political liability. Most observers believe that 2022 and 2024 will be challenging years for the Democrats, and the last thing they need is Harris to start cackling while discussing abortion or genocide, or some other serious subject. The clincher is that the Biden team can’t put her on ice without creating a massive issue for themselves, so they have to find something for her to do. That something is to send her out on the road to places where she can’t screw anything up because the Democrats know they aren’t going to win those areas anyway.

“It’s not necessarily that we’re going to win Mississippi or Louisiana, but it makes a difference in people knowing that they’re seen and they’re heard,” senior adviser to the president Cedric Richmond told POLITICO.

They have to create a space for her to play at being a national leader without any of the risk or authority that goes with such a position. And they have succeeded. Now they are just trying to convince anyone who is interested that this is part of some grand strategy for success rather than them running from a ticking time bomb.

Defending American Democracy Requires We Start by Crushing the Public School Weirdos

Defending American Democracy Requires We Start by Crushing the Public School Weirdos

By Kurt Schlichter

Source: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File

If you think pierced mutants with blue hair and gender confusion have some sort of right to leverage their position as public school teachers to groom your kids with racist Marxism and sexual confusion, you hate democracy. Schools were not established so that narcissistic stange-os with galaxy-sized daddy issues could work out their personal psychodramas using our children’s minds as props. They were established to teach our kids to read, write, do some math, and be useful citizens. And that’s what we, the People, want.

And we, the People, get to make the decision about what gets taught in our classrooms. The emphasis is on “our classrooms,” as in “not the government employees we hire to instruct classes” classrooms. I know where these people got the idea that the classrooms are their domain and we mere citizens are mere interlopers. They got it in their college education course classrooms, where they were taught that they are entering some sort of special caste by being teachers and have some sort of special claim on what goes on inside the schools that mere parents may not interfere with.

Baloney.

The kids are ours.

The schools are ours.

And the curriculum is ours.

Public education is not a vehicle to vindicate the feelz and thotz of the nimrods who teach in them. It’s to do the job we – the bosses – decree should be done, and nothing else. Teach our kids their ABCs and how to count.

And teach them about democracy, though the teachers clearly need a refresher. Let me help. Here’s how democracy works. We citizens decide, and you government flunkies obey. I would ask if you have any questions, but you shouldn’t. The chain of command is clear.

Citizen, followed by hireling. In that order.

I just love it when I see some mutated whiner on Tik Tok complaining that xe is not supposed to show videos if xis interpretative dance performance of “My Penis Confounds Me” to classrooms of second graders and how the mean old school board is cruelly repressing xis personal vision of a genderfluid future.

Yes, exactly. 

Yes, you are being repressed. You may not use the classroom as your personal venue for your delusional and stupid obsessions.

We call this “Democracy.” And ground zero in the fight to defend it is our local elementary.

Someone has to decide what gets taught in government schools. If you think the citizens should make that decision, you support democracy. If you think government workers should make that decision, you support a fascist dictatorship of the weirdoletariat.

Why do these leftist – and they are all leftists – hate democracy?

Well, because in a democracy other people get a say and these goofs do not get to do whatever they please on our dime using our facilities to indoctrinate and groom our kids.

Don’t be fooled. They are not for freedom. They are for their freedom to run roughshod over the rest of us, unaccountable and occupying the alleged moral high ground.

No.

No, we are not morally obligated to cater to the bizarre fetishes of unaccomplished drama royalty (I don’t want to misgender anyone by using the term “queens”) who got education decrees because getting a bachelor’s in communications was too hard. And one of my majors was communications so I am fully aware of the nature of the scam.

Time to tighten up on the teachers as a prelude to tightening up on useless public employee across the government.

Step One: 

Stop pretending teachers are, as a group, people worthy of our special respect and deference. Everyone had some great teachers. I remember a couple who made a difference for me. Neither was a pinko with delusions of genderfluidity. But let’s face it – most teachers are undistinguished time-serving hacks who drone along awaiting their pension. When I think of teachers, I remember the middle school math teacher I saw stagger out of the bar half in the bag at the Denny’s I worked at. Yeah, the early eighties were lit – bars in Denny’s!

As a group, “educators” are not smarter than us, and their track record of actually educating is a trainwreck. Do you think kids today are better educated than they were 40 or even 20 years ago? Maybe in terms of pronouns and privilege, but not in anything that’s not nonsense. For too long we gave teachers the benefit of the doubt. No longer. Now we need to give them orders and ultimatums.

Step Two:

Ban teachers’ unions. Public employee unions are a disaster anyway, but teachers’ unions are the worst. One lib teacher whining is insufferable. Hundreds of thousands banding together and funding the Democrats in return for influence is an apocalypse. It gives the worst people the most power over the most important thing – our kids’ future. Exhibit A: The COVID madness, in which the laziness and paranoia of unionized teachers stole years of our kids' lives. Put overpaid grifters like Randi Weingarten and the rest of her poisonous ilk out of a job, permanently.

Step Three:

When they called you a “terrorist” for participating in democracy, they gave the game away. Activism works. Now we need to take it to the next level by not just going to school board meetings but by running for the school board. And we have to withstand the lies and slanders when we act. Ban CRT. Ban gender weirdness. Ban grooming behavior. Get rid of porn and propaganda. Impose pro-family, pro-American curricula in place of the Marxist dross masquerading as education nowadays. They will scream and they will shout. They will call you “Nazis,” “racists,” and “transphobes.” But guess what? They are already calling you “Nazis,” “racists,” and “transphobes.” Ignore their howls and protests; fire those who will not conform. Be ruthless – for your kids’ sake.

Step Four: 

It’s not enough to clean out the current crap. We need to go old school in the schools. Emphasize that the purpose of public education is not to provide a platform for damaged people to perform their creepy vignettes. It is to teach and create good citizens. Mandate slacks, jackets, and ties for men, and slacks/dresses for women – and no, there will be no cross-dressing on campus. Nor rainbow hair colors nor studs through noses nor any other weird stuff. Our teachers are not getting paid to express themselves but to express what is normal. All that weird stuff is narcissism and attention-seeking, and that attention goes to precisely the wrong people. The people who should get attention in schools are the kids.

Step Five:

Stay Involved. When the high tide of this trend hits and the waters of weirdness starts to recede, we will be tempted to go back to not paying attention. Nope. Watch them like hawks. We need to stay activated to clean-out the abscess that is our education system and make sure the woke infection never returns.

This is what democracy looks like – the citizens telling the government what to do no matter how sad it makes the government flunkies. And when they oppose us, it only reaffirms that the left hates democracy.

WH Gives Completely Unacceptable Answers When Asked About CBP Agents Cleared in 'Whipping' Nontroversy

Sister Toldjah reporting for RedState 

We previously reported on the September “Whipgate” nontroversy which was stirred up by Democrat outrage mobs and the mainstream media, both of which alleged without evidence that Customs and Border Protection officers who were mounted on horseback could be seen in photos “whipping” Haitian migrants trying to cross the southern border.

President Joe Biden was among the worst offenders in stoking the outrage, infamously corrupting the investigation by saying the agents who had allegedly “strapped” the migrants “will pay,” while White House press secretary Jen Psaki disturbingly insinuated that the facts didn’t matter.

The story quickly collapsed almost as soon as it broke, thanks in large part to the very photographer who took the “controversial” pictures, who said in an interview that the images were “miscontrued.”

After the photographer made his remarks, some media outlets issued updates to their initial stories, including the NY Times, which noted they had “not seen conclusive evidence that migrants were struck with the reins.” Axios also posted a correction of sorts regarding one of their initial articles.

Nevertheless, the White House persisted in “keeping up appearances” on the issue, and insisted DHS would conduct a quick but thorough investigation on the matter even two months later, when the DHS inspector general declined to take up the investigation, leaving it in the hands of the CBP’s Office of Personal Responsibility (OPR).

In an update to this story, it was recently reported that the agents at the center of the accusations, who were placed on desk duty after the media/Democrat eruptions, were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing though the OPR administrative investigation is still ongoing and the agents could be fired if it’s found they broke any departmental policies.

During the Monday White House press briefing, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy repeatedly grilled Biden press secretary Jen Psaki on whether or not Biden and every other member of his administration (including her) would be apologizing to the agents for the accusations they leveled against them. Psaki, who will soon be a featured player on MSNBC’s “Peacock” streaming service, gave non-answers the entire time, with each one snider than the previous one as the animosity between her and Doocy, who she insinuated during a Thursday podcast was indeed a “stupid SOB” as Biden once called him, was palpable:

Peter Doocy: “We’ve been told that the mounted border patrol officers the president accused of ‘whipping’ migrants have been notified they will not face criminal charges. So, when is the president going to apologize to them?”

Jen Psaki: “There is a process and an investigation that’s gone to the Department of Homeland Security. I don’t have any update on that.”

Doocy: “The president said that they were ‘whipping’ people, which would be a criminal offense, and they’ve been told they’re not gonna be criminally charged.”

Psaki: “And there was an investigation into that and I’ll let the Department of Homeland Security announce any conclusion of that investigation.”

Doocy: “You accused these officers of ‘brutal and inappropriate measures.’ Now that they’ve been told they will not be criminally charged, will you apologize to them?”

Psaki: “And Peter, there was an investigation into their behavior. So, that investigation is playing out. Whenever it’s going to be announced, the Department of Homeland Security will announce that and I’m sure we’ll have a comment on it after that.”

Watch:

Just completely unacceptable answers considering the serious nature of their accusations against the agents, who were compared by some in the media to slaveowners from the Civil War days. They were very quick to judge early on even as the facts were being brought to the table, but seven months later they have no comment? What utter horse crap, no pun intended.

As I said before, the investigation could indeed have been finished within days and should have been, because there simply was and is no “there” there to this story. From most accounts, including the photographer’s, the CBP agents did not act out of bounds and certainly did not “whip” any of the migrants. But because the White House, including Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Psaki and others responded the way they did, this investigation – no matter who was conducting it – got dragged out, likely because they were forced to try and lend credence to the administration’s “concerns” about what (did not) happen.

Whatever the case may be, the fact that the DHS IG referred it back to the CBP in November was, in my view, further vindication not just for the agents but also for everyone else who insisted there no “there” there to this story. Presumably, we’ll find out more in the coming weeks as the CBP has just wrapped up its probe with the findings yet to be announced. But even if they also confirm there was no wrongdoing, don’t look for any mea culpas from this White House.

Because like with everything else, false “woke” narratives are more important than the actual facts, no matter how many reputations of good men have to be sacrificed in the process to make the current occupant of the Oval Office appear as though he’s In Charge and is Doing Something other than flailing his way through another badly scripted speech or badly botching his appearance at the annual White House Easter Egg roll.

Move Over, Pregnant Man. Here Are 9 More Woke Emojis Apple Is Rolling Out Soon

Babylon Bee🐝

Apple has finally come out in support of the woke movement, forcing the vast majority of the population, who haven't bought fully into transgender ideology, to have pregnant man emojis on their iPhones. But Apple isn't stopping there. We've got the inside scoop on these 9 even woker emojis the company is rolling out soon, and they are SO. VERY. BRAVE. If you don't stand up and applaud for every single one of these, you are part of the problem:

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1. A transgender woman swimmer - Wow, this CLEARLY FEMALE trans woman swimmer crushing all challengers is really inspiring. Go, girl!

2. An emoji for people who identify as attack helicopters PEW PEW PEW -  Brave. But be careful. If you use this ironically as a conservative joke Apple will drone-strike you.

3. A female eggplant emoji - If this grosses you out, check your cis privilege.

4. The new child drag queen emoji - Slay, little drag baby! Slay!

5. A groomer emoji - Support the courageous teachers who just want to teach the young'uns about weird sex stuff!

6. A gay transgender non-binary furry in a wheelchair - Apple has vowed not to rest until every single intersectional identity has its own emoji.

7. A trans MMA fighter beating up a woman - Breaking barriers and also faces.

8. A Ghostbusters female reboot emoji - Use this emoji to show you love the Ghostbusters female reboot or you are a bigot.

9. And finally, a catch-all "I support the current thing" emoji - For when you're not sure which emoji will ensure you don't get canceled. You can't go wrong.