Trump Should Get Back on Twitter

He needs unfiltered access to all Americans. He needs to do everything he can to get that access back.

by Josiah Lippincott for American Greatness

Cash the billion-dollar check, Mr. Trump.

I am no billionaire real estate magnate, but I know a good deal when I see one. If someone is offering you free money, no strings attached, you should take it 10 times out of 10. 

Elon Musk made precisely such an offer to Donald Trump when he unbanned Trump’s Twitter account earlier this month. The president should take him up on his offer. 

Researchers estimate that the media gave Trump as much as $5 billion in free advertising in 2016. Trump got that deal entirely because of his social media presence. Trump’s Twitter was an absolute force to be reckoned with. The man merely had to get on his phone, type out 240 characters, and he could drive the news cycle for the next day. 

You cannot buy that kind of cultural clout. But Trump had the panache, bravado, and raw political instincts to make it work. Conservatives have been completely locked out of other institutions of cultural and political power. But the rise of the social media giants—Twitter especially—proved to be a weakness in the liberal monolith that Trump exploited for full effect.

Controversy drives engagement on social media, but liberals are mostly boring lemmings regurgitating the same cookie cutter opinions: immigration, good; free trade, good; war overseas, good; Everyone to the right of John McCain? Literally Hitler. 

Trump shattered this consensus of losers. He burst onto the scene like a comet blazing across the American political sky. Remember in the spring of 2015 when it appeared that we would have a Bush versus Clinton race in ’16? Trump put paid to that idea by simply existing. 

Twitter was his superweapon, his unfiltered access to the American people. Complemented by Trump’s boisterous (and hilarious) rallies, the Teflon Don managed to “insult his way to the presidency,” bowling over his low-IQ, low energy competition. 

Trump’s charisma and popularity drove his enemies insane. Even now, seven years later, no one within the establishment Left or Right will ever forgive Trump for winning and shaming the entire professional American political class in the process. 

Trump faces an uphill battle in 2024. Despite his incredible popularity—no sitting president and no Republican has ever won as many votes as Donald Trump—the entire national security establishment, both political parties, the media, and America’s largest corporations have all dedicated themselves to defeating him. Can the American people and Trump join forces to take on the ruling oligarchy and win, again?

No one can know for certain but Trump’s victory becomes more probable if he can, once again, seize the political megaphone. The regime censored Trump because he was the greatest threat to their continued hegemony. It seems increasingly likely that Joe Biden will not stop at merely silencing Trump. The odds that they attempt to throw him in prison rise with each passing day. 

Trump needs every weapon he can get his hands on in this spiritual war. Twitter, arguably, is the most important. 

Trump needs to start tweeting. Every day and on every subject from politics to pop culture, vaccines, and Diet Coke. There isn’t a Democrat alive who could rival the messaging power that Trump’s return to Twitter would herald.  

So far, Trump has resisted being seduced by Twitter even after unbanning. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. Trump himself knows how important Twitter was to his win in 2016. So why has he refused to return in power and glory to his old domain?

The answer seems to be Truth Social. Trump’s contract with the company reportedly stipulates that he must post on Truth Social six hours before releasing the same content on any other platform. Trump also has a serious financial stake in Truth Social. This contractual and financial entanglement is likely the leading reason why Trump has refused to return to his most important social media perch. Trump could do so right now, however. He has an opt-out clause in his contract that allows him to post political messaging on other platforms. He should use it. 

Trump’s reluctance to leave Truth Social and start using Twitter isn’t an entirely irrational decision. If Trump leaves Truth Social, it will likely mean the end of the platform. This could become a problem later if Twitter decides, once again, to censor Trump’s voice. Truth Social gives Trump a critical ownership stake in his own media megaphone. That is useful. 

It is likely that both Trump and his team view Truth Social in the wrong light. They seem to believe that Truth Social can be an effective direct competitor to Twitter. Truth Social is essentially a Twitter clone with many of the same features—“re-Truths,” character limits, and the same timeline/homepage user interface. 

Yet Truth Social is losing money. Major social media companies like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok thrive on the network effect. They have a critical mass of users that make them impossible to ignore as a source of news and entertainment. Truth Social does not have that critical mass. 

At its current pace, both Trump and Truth Social are likely to suffer. A more free-speech friendly Twitter would eliminate Truth Social’s reason for being. If Truth Social wants to survive, it should reinvent itself. Trump can spearhead this necessary change and benefit in the process.

Instead of Truth Social simply copying Twitter’s model, it should adopt an entirely different strategy closer to that pioneered by Substack. Instead of a free-to-use model that depends on advertising, Truth Social should switch to an entirely subscription-based model. 

Users should be required to pay a monthly fee—say, $5—in order to use, and read posts on Truth Social. In essence, Truth Social would become a “walled garden” of free speech permanently protected for American conservatives. It would effectively become Trump’s private Substack but without the intermediaries. Trump could create content only for Truth Social users such as video messages, interviews, and engagement that are platform specific. 

There is good evidence that this model could work. Trump has enormous personal loyalty among his base and lots of small-dollar donors and supporters who would be willing to pay for special access to the president. Trump’s recent sale of 45,000 NFTs for $100 a pop sold out in 12 hours. No one else in American political life could manage such a feat. 

Right now, Truth Social has roughly 2 million active users. A conversion rate of 5 percent to a paid model (the average expected conversion rate to paid subscribers on Substack) would yield Truth Social a monthly income of $500,000 or six million dollars a year. Right now, SEC filings reveal that Truth Social lost 6 million dollars in the first half of 2022 alone. It is also hemorrhaging users. Building a small but profitable social media company is better than having a larger site that is a money sink. 

Trump should restructure his contract with Truth Social to change the kind of content he creates for the platform. He should promise Truth Social longer-form content on a recurring basis. The top 10 Substack newsletters generate tens of thousands of subscribers and  $20 million a year. Trump could easily blow those numbers out of the water on his own platform in the long run. He should then use his Twitter presence to boost his campaign and drive users to Truth Social. 

Trump should insist that Truth Social take a hands-off approach to censorship as well, by minimizing centralized removal of all but illegal speech. Even Twitter under Musk won’t go that far. Our ruling class very much fears losing the ability to police what Americans are allowed to say. 

Truth Social should become a bastion for anonymous online political discourse, right-wing humor, free speech, and Trump’s own longer-form content. This business model, combined with a subscription structure, has the best chance to attain long term profitability and to serve as an effective competitor to both Twitter and Substack by combining the best features of both platforms.

America needs Trump and Trump needs Twitter. He needs unfiltered access to all Americans. Trump should do everything he can to get that access back. He should preserve Truth Social in the process by adopting a model that will sustain the platform for future conservatives. Both aims are not only achievable but necessary. 

Trump should not leave Elon’s free money on the table. Instead, he should return to once again conquer social media space.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- December 26

 

Been obsessed with finding old tunes today.

Here's tonight's news:

What Will the FBI Not Do? ~ VDH

Who watches the watchers?

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was. 

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself. 

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax. 

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election. 

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified. 

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:

As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.

 McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.

Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists. 

Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”  

Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes. 

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution. 

Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.

Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information. 

The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions. 

During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed. 

Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper. 

Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.

The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016. 

In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.” 

Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency: 

I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

 When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.” 

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,”  Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence? 

What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?

The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption. 

Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.

Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI. 

There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau. 

The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas. 

The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes. 

The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax. 

Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. 

We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

DIE on the Road to Global Tyranny

posted by Harry G. Hutchinson at American Thinker

Francis Fukuyama claimed, dubiously, that we are witnessing the end of history, with the universalization of liberal democracy as the final form of human government.  Yet we live in a world of worrisome pendulum shifts.  Republican congressional leaders disprove Fukuyama's claim as they celebrate their stunning betrayal of the American people by supporting the passage of the $1.7-trillion McConnell-Schumer omnibus bill.  Rather than protect America's southern border and comply with Congress's constitutional duty, this bill moves the country farther to the left by explicitly funding a "woke" identity group supporting LGBT indoctrination in elementary schools, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police.  At the same time, this bill hands more power to a federal government dedicated to the preposterous claim that America is systemically racist.

This explosive proposition is aided and abetted by several additional contentions.  Dangerous contentions include claims that enforcing the United States Constitution fairly and equally, administering laws without focusing on visual identity, and advancing merit rather than identity-based preferences are forms of unconscious racism.  Such claims flourish because our overlords ignore the observation that truth is no defense against fools determined to believe lies.

Elites' hysterical claims verify René Girard's observation that concern for victims overwhelms modern culture and signals a genuine exhaustion of all other sources of authority.  Elites' vulgar claims regarding race also ignore evidence showing that Asian-American women surpass white men in weekly earnings, as well as data showing that Syrian-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans had significantly higher median household incomes than whites.  They also have higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies.  Indeed, African-born black women had higher earnings than U.S.-born white women.  

Despite such evidence, Critical Race proponent Ibram X. Kendi contends that the solution to past discrimination is state-sponsored present discrimination and the solution to current discrimination is future government-mandated discrimination favoring those classified as society's victims.  Hence, Kendi and proponents of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) reject Chief Justice Roberts's perceptive claim that the way to stop discriminating based on race "is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Rather than prevent discrimination based on race, DIE advances such discrimination.  This approach has become the guiding principle and dominant focus of many foundations, corporations, academic institutions, and the federal government.  Philanthropic foundations are particularly pernicious in advancing DIE.  This is so because foundations fund early-stage research and development designed to solve societal issues.  Thus, whatever philanthropies support today has the potential for widespread implementation in the future.  

Not to be outdone in advancing this toxic agenda, the World Economic Forum continues to push DIE by emphasizing identity-based rights.  In reality, this approach often hides the WEF's ambition to dominate the world via tyrannical control by elites who seek to collapse any sustainable democratic order.  Tyranny can be seen in the Davos, Switzerland–based WEF push for the Great Reset.  This move links social justice issues to oppressive COVID-19 policies, vaccine mandates, climate change apocalypticism, social protest in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and green energy mania.  Collaborative efforts by the U.S. government and the WEF are designed to eradicate the best aspects of the American experiment, which has brought prosperity and opportunity to many rank-and-file Americans.

Fleeing from the rule of law, respect for individual rights, and equal treatment under the law, globalist cultural elites no longer wish to advance the interest of working and middle-class Americans.  Instead, they disdain such groups.  They prefer to push an agenda that ultimately impoverishes Americans, including members of ethnic groups they claim to care about.  Impoverishment advances because the DIE's foundational "white privilege" thesis distracts from a focus on human development.  Focusing on human development — stable families, stable fatherhood, and healthy study habits — has generated favorable results for Asian-Americans and others, including second-generation West Indian blacks.  

To be clear, DIE is a social justice movement that ignores evidence showing that between 1940 and 1960, the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points.  During the 1960s, median black household income doubled without racial preferences.  Ignoring such evidence, DIE, like most ideologies, including Critical Race Theory, promises an earthly paradise fueled by revolutionary neo-Marxist ideas.  But instead of delivering on its promise of liberty, this ideology advances discrimination against Asian-Americans and others.  Modern social justice movements, just like progressivism and the New Deal, place Westerners in bondage rather than delivering on the promise of unlimited freedom.

Taken as a whole, the DIE movement led by neo-liberal, neo-revolutionary elites is a Marxist-inspired ideology that seeks the destruction of Western civilization.  This movement is part of a counter-revolution led by our cultural overlords.  The DIE movement facilitates a dazzling transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes to the wealthy.  Incapable of accommodating diverse beliefs and not content with merely transferring wealth, this movement now demands more.  Hence, philanthropic institutions, governments, and academic institutions want to control our daily lives — even our thoughts — while reinterpreting and reimagining the Constitution to ensure that average Americans no longer count.  The weaponization of race and other forms of human identity is the first step in a deadly process designed to devalue the lives of ordinary people, who will never be invited to Davos, Switzerland.   

All I Want For Christmas Is Justice For The Dobbs Leaker, But John Roberts Is Gifting Leftists With Conspiracy Theory Fodder Instead

Roberts’ failure to publicly identify the Dobbs leaker has allowed Democrats to foment conspiracy theories about his colleagues.

Shawn Fleetwood reporting for The Federalist

It’s been 233 days since the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, and Americans are still no closer to learning the identity of the individual responsible.

Published in Politico on May 2, the draft opinion prematurely revealed that the high court had decided to strike down the nonsensical precedent established in Roe v. Wade that invented a constitutional “right” to an abortion. Within 24 hours of the draft’s publication, Chief Justice John Roberts announced he had authorized the launch of an investigation to determine the source of the leak.

“To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed,” Roberts said. “This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here.”

Many in conservative circles remained hopeful in the weeks following that the culprit would be brought to justice swiftly. Even Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, while speaking at a judicial conference on Sept. 8, expressed optimism the report would be released “soon.”

But as months went by, any confidence conservatives had in seeing some form of accountability for the individual responsible began to fade.

Democrat Conspiracy Theories

Upset at the high court’s decision to topple their pagan idol of abortion, Democrats and their allies in corporate media have spent the past few months concocting the most baseless conspiracy theory of all: that Justice Samuel Alito — the author of the majority opinion in Dobbs — was the one who leaked the draft opinion.

Last month, the swastika-obsessed New York Times published accusations by Rev. Rob Schenck, who claimed he was told the outcome of the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby before it was released. In the case, the court ruled in a 5-4 decision that Hobby Lobby did not have to abide by a mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services that required the company to “provide and facilitate four potentially life-terminating drugs and devices in their health insurance plan, against their religious convictions, or pay severe fines.”

In a letter sent to Chief Justice Roberts in July, Schenck — a former pro-life activist who now supports abortion — claimed he was informed of the case’s outcome by Gayle Wright, a donor to his nonprofit organization who Schenck asserts was told by Alito during a dinner at the justice’s home in June 2014.

But there’s one small problem with Schenck’s accusation: Wright denies that Alito ever told her such a thing.

“[Gayle Wright] in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information,” the Times report reads. Alito has also denied Schenck’s claims, calling them “completely false.”

The accusations are so flimsy that even the Times admitted in their article that “[t]he evidence for Mr. Schenck’s account of the breach has gaps.”

In an attempt to smear Alito, congressional Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee invited Schenck to testify before the body earlier this month. The hearing totally backfired for Democrats, however, after Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan exposed Schenck for making false claims about former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

🔥 WOW 🔥@Jim_Jordan OBLITERATES the credibility of the Democrats' star witness at today's hearing examining the Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/xcCn19nndN

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) December 8, 2022

Despite Schenck’s track record as a liar, Democrats have continued to use the Times’ unsubstantiated hit piece to push the conspiracy theory that Alito leaked the draft majority opinion in Dobbs.

“All evidence suggests Justice Alito leaked the Dobbs opinion—especially after the NYT’s bombshell reporting on his alleged leak of the Hobby Lobby decision,” New York Democrat Rep. Mondaire Jones baselessly claimed in a tweet. “Americans deserve accountability for our nation’s highest court.”

John Roberts has Failed the Nation

Given the close-knit, inner workings of the Supreme Court and the small number of individuals granted access to draft opinions, it seems highly irregular, if not unlikely, that court authorities have not identified the leaker. That it’s been more than seven months and the American public still doesn’t have clear answers is a reflection on the poor statesmanship of Chief Justice John Roberts, whose pledge to hold the leaker accountable has proven to be empty rhetoric.

As I previously wrote in August, “Roberts’ failure to provide swift and deserved accountability to the individual responsible sets a dangerous precedent, one where overtly political figures operating at the high court can leak decisions ahead of their release without fear of repercussion.”

In failing to expose the leaker, Roberts has also given Democrats in Congress and America’s legacy media room to run wild with unhinged conspiracy theories designed to character-assassinate his Republican-appointed colleagues. His inaction hasn’t simply damaged his fellow justices; it’s tarnished the institution of the Supreme Court as a whole.

The Public Information Office of the U.S. Supreme Court did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on the status of the investigation or a timetable for the release of its findings.

Kinzinger Smears MTG Over Jan. 6, Accidentally Exposes Holes in Dem Narrative Against Trump

Nick Arama reporting for RedState 

On Christmas Eve, most people are probably focused on Christmas. But not Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who can’t seem to stop embarrassing himself with his Twitter rants. But this time, his tweets exposed just how empty and partisan the Jan. 6 Committee’s “investigation” has been. He did that as he tried to attack Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Kinzinger tries to smear his colleague by saying she had a role in “fomenting” the riot. He doesn’t provide any evidence for that, just a smear-and-run job. Then he responds to her point about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the National Guard by saying that only the President and the Secretary of the Army can deploy them.

Kinzinger follows that up by saying that if President Donald Trump had ordered the National Guard, they would have been there and that Pelosi can’t countermand the order of the President.

However, he leaves out a lot in that misleading rant, and that’s a problem. This is why much of the left is deluded on the subject.

As we’ve reported in the past, the IG report indicated that President Donald Trump wanted to ensure that the rally he had that day was a “safe event.” On Jan. 3, he brought up the question of the National Guard for what was expected to be a large crowd.

“Mr. Miller and GEN Milley met with the President at the White House at 5:30 p.m.,” the IG reported. “The primary topic they discussed was unrelated to the scheduled rally. GEN Milley told us that at the end of the meeting, the President told Mr. Miller that there would be a large number of protestors on January 6, 2021, and Mr. Miller should ensure sufficient National Guard or Soldiers would be there to make sure it was a safe event. Gen Milley told us that Mr. Miller responded, ‘We’ve got a plan and we’ve got it covered.’”

On Jan. 2, the Capitol Police’s timeline of events shows that the Department of Defense’s Carol Corbin texted USCP Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher to determine if the Capitol Police wanted the National Guard at the Capitol. Gallagher responded to her that he was not requesting the National Guard after consultation with the Chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund.

So Trump made the offer/suggestion, but the Capitol Police never requested it. If they’re not requesting it, it’s not likely it’s going to be deployed. This, of course, pokes holes in the idea that somehow Trump wanted violence when, in fact, he not only thought there should be a National Guard presence but he also urged his supporters at his rally to act “peacefully and patriotically.”

As we reported according to the GOP report on Jan. 6, it was Pelosi’s staff who was working with the Capitol Police on the security for the day, contrary to her narrative that she wasn’t involved in security. It’s the Capitol Police who are responsible for the security of the Capitol, not the National Guard. And the Capitol Police rejected the offer of the National Guard.

Some on the left point to this letter from Christopher Miller about the deployment of the National Guard to suggest that somehow he/Trump incapacitated the Guard from protecting the Capitol, but the folks on the left who think that fail to understand this letter and the context. Click on to enlarge:

The letter references a limited contingent of the National Guard which had been deployed at the request of Mayor Muriel Bowser to D.C. for crowd control. They were not deployed to protect the Capitol since there was no request from the Capitol Police.

In a letter on Jan. 5 that Bowser posted on Twitter, she specifically noted unarmed National Guard and did not want additional people.

So Miller was acting per her limited request.

Why? This was because there was a lot of leftist angst over the National Guard’s response to the BLM/Antifa riots. It’s important to understand the discussion in that context. If there were any issues, they were likely to come from the left, based on history.

So why doesn’t Kinzinger lay all this out? Because that would destroy the carefully constructed narrative that they’ve been putting out there to hoodwink the American people. And that’s shameful.