I was watching MSNBC the other day – I know, but it is fun to look into a parallel universe where progressive ideals appeal to the vast majority of Americans, it makes me appreciate reality all the more – and I had to check my phone to make sure I had the right year. You wouldn’t know it was 2024 if you’d just gone by the rhetoric belching its way over the airwaves. Donald Trump is a Russian stooge – a tool of Putin – who is only interested in…well, you know the rest of that song. In fact, you know the rest of all the songs, as the political left has morphed into a cover band playing all their hits that were never really hits in the first place. They learned nothing from the election.
As the father of two kids, one thing you hope they do from all the mistakes they make, and they make a lot of mistakes, is learn from them. Democrats aren’t learning from anything, and it is glorious.
With the exception of who the President is going to be on the 20th and who controls the Senate, nothing has changed in their world. They still insist they are popular – a majority, in fact – in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. It’s simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.
It’s hilarious because watching adults try to convince themselves that they’re popular is very amusing. It’s horrifying because the denialism is dangerous. Not for Republicans, for the country.
As Joe Biden readies to retire, he is a destructive force and the 20th of January cannot come fast enough. I shudder to think of the damage he can and will do between now and then to the nation and the world. He will do all he can to make it happen. Prepare yourself for a list of pardons unlike anything before seen in American history. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he pardoned Ghislaine Maxwell at this point, as I can only imagine the dirt he has on Biden’s friends and fellow Democrats.
An outgoing President with no F’s left to give is a gigantic danger, an entire half of the political establishment with a denialist attitude is…well, we don’t know.
Democrats have a history of pretending what is actually is not, and vice versa, so that’s nothing new. But as they’ve moved closer and closer to their radical fringe, their denialism is inspiring more and more attacks. Remember James Hodgkinson? Remember the trans school shooter in Nashville? Democrats hope you don’t, but not all of MSNBC’s ratings dip can be attributed to people turning it off, some viewers have died.
A Democrat with nothing to lose, full of self-righteousness and dripping with smug, can either be a great laugh or a violent thug. Most are harmless, but it doesn’t take more than one to do something awful.
Murphy then went on to add that Robert Kennedy Jr. “wants to ban pharmaceutical advertising, that’s nice. He also wants to kill our kids by withdrawing vaccines from our schools and taking fluoride out of our drinking water.”
What would you do to someone you honestly believed was trying to kill your kids, or just kids in general? And you’re not mentally unstable enough to subscribe to the belief that someone like Chris Murphy, who just a year and a half ago decried “demagogues and provocateurs” who “lead with messages of hate and division,” but some people out there are. What will they conceive of in order to “fight back” or prevent this awful fate?
Cabinet Secretaries and FBI Directors get security details, but they aren’t that large. Normal people do not. People who put Trump lawn signs in front of their houses do not.
Maybe Democrats did learn something from the election: that they need to dial the crazy up to 11. Or maybe they’ll just do it anyway because they’re just evil enough not to care about the consequences of what they’re doing – agenda über alles, in its original German on purpose. I just hope it all falls on deaf ears.
The First Amendment’s free speech protections and “academic freedom” at colleges and universities are pillars of American democracy. But knowledgeable observers long have recognized that subversives, including members of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), use these freedoms to foment revolutionary change in the United States, including the hoped-for creation of a new Marxist United Socialist States of America (USSA).
While sometimes recognizing such seditious activities, most Americans have long believed that American democracy was strong enough to keep subversive ideas at the fringes of society. Many Americans still believe such freedoms cannot be limited without jeopardizing important freedoms generally. But these threats are no longer minor nuisances that society can ignore. Now widespread, campus-based sedition is key for revolutionaries because colleges and universities create new generations of radicals who Marxists hope will help them take power. Academics generate ideas that rationalize the often deceptive subversion characteristic of all Marxism variants. Angela Davis, the black and lesbian activist who twice was the CPUSA’s vice presidential candidate, put the point well, calling Pan-African studies programs at American universities the “intellectual arm of the revolution.”
While many deficiencies of American colleges and universities are widely recognized, awareness of their root causes and consequences, if not stopped, is incomplete. Marxists’ deceptions have been effective. The threat is dire, and major reforms are needed. The Trump administration has a rare opportunity to significantly reform higher education in ways that restore traditional educational standards, not impose other ideologies, and target Marxism-motivated sedition.
Marxists’ ability to recruit idealists, entrap fellow travelers, and indoctrinate naïve dupes who would be foot soldiers in the Marxian revolution that true believers aspire to foment is well established. Histories of Marxian ambitions, occasional failings, and resilience are in many books, often by former Marxists, such as Louis Budenz, Eugene Lyons, and Benjamin Gitlow, on the subversive techniques of the CPUSA as an instrument of the Soviet Union, Ronald and Allis Radosh on communists’ use of Hollywood films as propaganda tools, and Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley on American spies for Moscow. More recently, Roger Kimball, Allan Bloom, and others documented how the detritus of the New Left reorganized and contaminated universities ideologically.
Cultural Marxism, suggested by Antonio Gramsci and Frankfurt School theorists, focuses on subverting societies through integrated attacks on education, the press, religion, law, and the family. Their followers have embedded Marxian perspectives in key American institutions, including, in recent years, the federal government and in colleges and universities. These include the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) agenda—an implementing technique of critical race theory, an offshoot of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory, ” which is designed to exacerbate societal divisions. Recently reemergent techniques of cultural Marxism include drag queen story hours designed to confuse young children about sexual realities.
Nowhere are these techniques and their effects more pronounced than on campuses.
As documented in polling data, American colleges and universities are hotbeds of radical political views. Since October 2023, professors have often been at the forefront of frequently violent—but reportedly “mostly peaceful”—demonstrations against Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas, as described in deceptively sympathetic press accounts. Exuberant campus rhetoric often extends to advocacy of violence against Jews generally.
Revolutionary Marxian ideas, including advocacy of violence against capitalists, are attaining widespread currency, especially among young people. For example, a recent Emerson College poll found that 41 percent of young people believe the murder of United Healthcare chief Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024, is “acceptable.”
Campus leftists rationalize their radicalism on many grounds, including assertions that “academic freedom” permits any political claim or action short of large-scale physical violence. They duplicitously claim they are just “progressives” pursuing “social justice.” Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 goal of “repressive tolerance,” suppressing non-Marxian perspectives while touting radical views, has been achieved on many campuses. Ideology-generated speech codes are common. The original purposes of academic freedom and tenure—to protect creative, unconventional thinking—have been hijacked to suppress non-Marxian thinking and rationalize subversive islands of Marxian orthodoxy and ideology-motivated activism, often at significant financial and political expense.
Key to crafting an effective reform package is the recognition that the dysfunctions of modern campuses are products of coherent programs driven by ideology, not merely ill-chosen policies or courses. Reforms must address the root causes of revolutionary ambitions, not just their symptoms. Recent rollbacks of some DEI programs, while welcome, are insufficient. School administrators must ensure that all policies, programs, syllabi, and faculty advocacy are not even subjectively ideological in nature, subject to federal penalties, including total funding bans for DEI-related policies that violate civil rights laws.
Congress should enact legislation that incorporates elements of the Sedition Act of 1918—which banned speech deemed harmful to the war effort by the Wilson administration—or aspects of the Alien Registration Act of 1940, commonly known as the Smith Act, which required members of the CPUSA and others who swore allegiance to the Soviet Union to register with the government. A liberal Supreme Court declared the Smith Act unconstitutional in 1957. The CPUSA is weaker now and the USSR no longer exists, but revolutionary Marxian goals live on in radicals who embrace other Marxian sects with religion-like faith.
Such reforms will require clarifying concepts of “free speech” and academic freedom. Liberal dupesstill support radicals’ demands for “free speech” rights to sedition. Reforming concepts of acceptable speech is possible. Democratic Germany restricts discussion of aspects of its Nazi and radical leftist past to help prevent the recurrence of past horrors. Indeed, verbal advocacy of violence frequently leads to extremist violence. Like Germany, the U.S. government needs better tools to restrain subversive speech and seditious actions.
Responsible people reasonably resent the ongoing campaign to destroy Western civilization. They, too, need effective, legally permissible defensive and counter-offensive tools. The Trump administration should work hard to restore genuine freedoms and act decisively against existential domestic threats to national security. Educational institutions are a great place to start!
John A. Gentry, a former CIA analyst, is adjunct faculty with the School of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University and the author of Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence (Academica Press, 2025). Follow him on Twitter @gentry_johna or contact him at gentry.ja49@gmail.com.
The outgoing Biden administration is wreaking slow-motion havoc on America. Plans and projects of regime transformation, regulations, and new rules to tie up the law in both straightforward and convoluted ways, and other actions to hastily circumvent MAGA, are being ginned up and rammed through as Biden goes out the door. These perversions of executive authority, at once reckless and carefully designed, plainly sweeping and seemingly trivial, are a fitting epitaph for the lawless and incompetent Biden administration. That doesn’t make them any more palatable, of course, and the question is what to do about it.
Starting January 20, the Trump administration can deploy a limited lawfare, narrowly tailored to punish present and former executive-branch officials who figured they could get away with setting America on paths which it would be ill-advised to take by means as peremptory and Machiavellian as the officials imposed (or attempted to impose) on the country.
Limited lawfare doesn’t have to concern only actions in the interregnum between an incoming and an outgoing administration. But a presidential interregnum is ideal for showing how limited lawfare can work. For one thing: it focuses mainly on government operatives, not largely on private citizens such as the J6 protesters. This reminds us that U.S. district attorneys and their subordinates are not exempt; real light can thereby be thrown on the false braying of progressives about “the rule of law.” Matthew Graves’s actions, and not only in the interregnum (he resigned last week as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia), invite particular scrutiny.
Also, charges need not be brought only in Washington, D.C.; they can be brought in any area of the country affected by miscreant officials’ actions.
One priority of limited lawfare this year might be the targeting of officials making -- since the election but before Trump takes office -- hastily-contrived legal changes that expand or solidify immigration. Another might be the targeting of officials who in that same period provided money and weapons to Ukraine from the discretionary budget, and of American intelligence officers who give Ukraine indispensable military-target information.
Officials in the Biden administration are the ones indulging in institutional trickery right now. They are the correct recipients of limited lawfare. The Trump administration’s lawfare can be restricted to these people, and not engaged in more widely.
As always, the problem is identifying all the culprits. To do this, the general approach should be to start with the person(s) with the ultimate line authority in the relevant segment of government, while keeping in mind that two or more segments of government might be involved in any given perversion of executive authority. Then unspool the thread down to, say, the GS-15 level of federal government officialdom. Work from the top to the bottom, and not the other way around. Apply a sort of upside-down subsidiarity principle, whereby the highest explicable -- or formally responsible -- government official is the person to target first in every offending executive-branch segment. For practical purposes, administrative-branch officials, whose authority formally stems from the executive branch, will be included.
Narrowly-tailored lawfare is not only justified in extreme circumstances (such as we seem to be seeing with the Biden administration in its nihilistic panic about its expiration date), but may be necessary to limit the damage, especially in the longer run by discouraging such activities via the threat of the lawfare cudgel.
As a hypothetical illustration, suppose we know that some Chinese agents in an isolated building in Chicago are about to unleash a devastating virus on the country, and the best way to stop it, and prevent the virus from escaping, is to unexpectedly hit them from all sides with flamethrowers, in contravention of international law after World War II, which strictly forbids the use of flamethrowers against an enemy. That’s what limited lawfare amounts to. It ain’t pretty, but it’s eminently salutary in how well it gets the job done. Nothing else may work quite so well. Call it “tough justice,” akin to tough love.
What if limited lawfare is abused? If it is, we will take that to be a lesson learned -- in the very process by which payback (“a dose of your own medicine”) is administered. We will know then what to avoid in the future, whether it be only the unlimited lawfare as practiced by Democrats in recent years (with the scandalous support of most law professors), or whether limited lawfare also presents unacceptably great risks. Let experience be our guide.
Limited lawfare scales down lawfare in the same way that John Rawls’s “Political Liberalism” scales down liberalism. Although a full theory of justified lawfare may eventually be needed, limited lawfare is intuitively a plausible conception. We simply construe justified lawfare as that which is narrowly tailored and directed at a well-defined class of government officials. Thus, Trump’s corrective lawfare will be weighed against the degree of the manipulativeness, peremptoriness, and maliciousness of certain actions of the outgoing Biden folks. (The Supreme Court loves weighing X against Y.)
In short, this nascent theory of limited lawfare is a calibrated way of fighting fire with fire. It’s not dissimilar to Israel’s efficient and nuanced way of fighting Hamas and Hezb’allah. To Democrats abusing the tools of executive-branch power at the close of the Biden administration, just know that your current activities might come back to bite you.
Disgraced ex-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney was awarded one of the highest civilian honors last week after House Republicans referred the vice chair of the since-disbanded Select Committee on Jan. 6 to the Justice Department for criminal charges.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden presented Cheney with the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who chaired the Democrats’ Soviet-style inquisition on the Capitol riot, for their work running the probe. In December, however, the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., released a nearly 130-page review of the Jan. 6 Committee’s work, concluding Cheney should face a criminal investigation for “witness tampering.”
“Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge,” the report said. Cheney had coordinated to circumvent Hutchinson’s attorney even as the vice chair of the Jan. 6 panel threatened legal action against anyone who attempted to influence witness testimony. The textbook case of projection was just one in a series of episodes wherein House investigators deputized by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi concealed truths surrounding the riot on Jan. 6.
1. January 6th Was An ‘Insurrection’
Democrats on the Jan. 6 panel and beyond deployed the term “insurrection” to characterize the two hours of violence at the Capitol like they collectively developed Tourette’s as a nasty side effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome. If what happened at the Capitol, however, were actually an attempted insurrection, then why weren’t any of the Jan. 6 defendants ever charged and convicted of “insurrection?” Because the term was used as nothing but a charged political phrase to frame Trump and his supporters as existential threats to democracy itself.
2. Democracy Almost Died
In her post-congressional memoir published in 2023, Cheney solemnly wrote “we almost lost our republic that day,” referencing the demonstrations on Jan. 6, 2021. At a public hearing in 2022, Chairman Thompson similarly said, “our system nearly failed and our democratic foundation” was almost “destroyed.” Except such hyperbolic claims never had any merit. Lawmakers were promptly escorted to secure locations after security at the Capitol was compromised, and Congress was able to reconvene just hours after. The continuity of government was never jeopardized, despite what the Jan. 6 Committee convinced themselves and their supporters to believe.
3. Trump Incited The ‘Insurrection’
The Jan. 6 Committee concluded its investigation with criminal referrals for President Trump of having incited, assisted, or aided and comforted an “insurrection.” The recommendation for criminal charges rests on the conspiracy peddled by the Jan. 6 Committee that because Trump spoke at the White House on the day of the riot, he must have inspired his supporters to take over the Capitol during the joint session of Congress. An honest examination of the transcript from Trump’s Ellipse speech, however, shows the president explicitly demanded that his supporters protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The mob gathered at the Capitol, meanwhile, had already breached the first barriers before the president had even finished speaking.
4. Trump Was Enthusiastic About The Violence
President Trump, the Jan. 6 Committee said, was not just apathetic about the violence, but was enthusiastic, according to testimony from the panel’s star witness, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Trump, Hutchinson said in her public testimony, approved of demonstrators who were demanding to “hang” the vice president. But House investigators who reviewed the Jan. 6 Committee’s charges found “no evidence that President Trump agreed with rioters chanting ‘hang Mike Pence.'”
5. Trump Tried To Hijack Limousine To Riot At The Capitol Himself
One of Hutchinson’s most hysterical claims was that President Trump assaulted Secret Service personnel to take over a government vehicle and drive himself to the Capitol where he could join the rioters. Hutchinson, however, was immediately discredited by her own sources following her public appearance and was further undermined in the nearly 130-page review of the Jan. 6 Committee’s conduct last month. In fact, a new transcript with a Secret Service driver kept under seal by Cheney’s team directly contradicted Hutchinson’s tale.
“I did not see him reach. He never grabbed the steering wheel,” the driver had told investigators on the Jan. 6 panel. “I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all.”
6. Trump Dismissed Need For National Guard
In her memoir, Cheney characterized Trump as negligent in his role to deploy the National Guard ahead of electoral certification.
“To be clear, the issue was not that the Secret Service failed to brief those up the chain at the White House about the threat,” Cheney wrote. “It appeared to the Committee that this information was being conveyed up the chain, including directly to Mark Meadows and President Trump.”
“With the weight of the intelligence we received via Homeland Security, it is exceptionally difficult to believe that anyone in the White House with access to this information could have failed to recognize this obvious menace,” she wrote.
Except Trump was adamant about local and congressional officials preparing for mass demonstrations by demanding pre-emptive deployment of 10,000 troops from the National Guard. Cheney’s committee just covered up Trump’s plea by concealing another transcript from a witness lawmakers tried to discredit after Pelosi refused to accept federal reinforcements multiple times in the days leading up to the riot.
7. Demonstrations Were Mostly Violent
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson flipped the Jan. 6 Committee’s narrative of an excessively violent demonstration on its head when he aired additional footage from the Capitol released to his team by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy two years ago.
“These are the pictures you’ve seen of Jan. 6,” Carlson said on his now-defunct prime-time program. “But it turns out there’s quite a bit of video you haven’t seen. And that video tells a very different story about what happened on Jan. 6.”
Carlson’s producers reviewed more than 40,000 hours of security footage kept under seal by House Democrats revealing a far different demonstration at the Capitol than the few scenes exploited by the Jan. 6 Committee to depict what they claimed was an eruption of domestic terrorism.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah mocked the hysteria from the committee when Cheney reposted clips of the riot featuring the most turbulent scenes in response to Carlson’s program.
“Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote on X. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting.
8. Capitol Police Officer Was Killed In Riot
The New York Times quietly corrected a story blaming Capitol rioters for the death of deceased officer Brian Sicknick, but members of the Jan. 6 Committee never have. In fact, during a hearing months after a report from the D.C. medical examiner’s office concluded Officer Sicknick died of natural causes, then-Rep. Elaine Lauria claimed he “succumbed to his injuries” from the riot “the night of January 7th.”
The only two people to die directly from the riot were female Trump supporters Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a Capitol police officer promoted two years after the riot, and Roseanne Boyland, who was trampled. Footage aired by Carlson in the Jan. 6 tapes show Sicknick, the officer allegedly bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher, vigorously walking around the Capitol following the hit.
9. Loudermilk Gave Rioters ‘Reconnaissance Tours’
In the summer of 2022, House Democrats accused Rep. Loudermilk of giving “reconnaissance tours” ahead of the “attack on the Capitol” after viewing security footage of the Georgia lawmaker escorting constituents around the building.
“The FBI totally cleared them,” Loudermilk told Carlson when the network host aired the Jan. 6 tapes. “The committee knew this before they actually made their accusations against me.”
10. The Jan. 6 Committee Was Legitimate
Then-Speaker Pelosi violated House rules when she banned minority representation on her Select Committee to investigate Jan. 6. The unprecedented move to bar Republican lawmakers from the committee meant Cheney had misled witnesses and federal agencies about the panel’s legitimate bipartisanship. Because House rules dictate that ranking committee members must be appointed by the minority party, Cheney, who was appointed by the Democrat speaker at the time, served as the panel’s vice chair.
The Select Committee was ostensibly established “to investigate and report upon” the objective “facts and causes relating to the preparedness and response of the United States Capitol Police and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement” in the course of the Capitol riot as outlined by the committee’s establishing resolution. Yet Pelosi’s commission instead targeted private citizens who exercised their constitutional right of free assembly. The legitimacy of the committee’s actions has always remained in question, since Congress is not one of the branches of government tasked with investigating alleged crimes of private citizens.
With each passing day, lame-duck President Joe Biden seems to debase himself and his "legacy" even further as he takes juvenile measures to kneecap the incoming Trump administration and flip off the American public. On Saturday, for instance, he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two of the most undeserving figures of all time, George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
That’s just one example of Doddering Joe burning down the house as he heads for the exit.
True to form, he pulled another fast one on Monday and engineered the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees—some of them former Bin Laden bodyguards and committed terrorists—to Oman to “re-settle” them.
Are you kidding? There are some people who simply cannot be "re-settled." If you worked for Osama bin Laden, you are one of them.
If this move was so important, why wasn’t it done earlier in his administration instead of at the last minute as his disastrous reign comes to an end?
The Biden administration on Monday announced the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees, including two former bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, being held at a U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba to Oman, which has agreed to help re-settle them, amid steps to reduce the population at the controversial military facility.
All of the men were captured in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and were held for more than two decades without being charged or put on trial, the New York Times reported.
"The United States appreciates the willingness of the government of Oman and other partners to support ongoing U.S. efforts focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility," the Defense Department said in a statement.
Here are some of the lovelies we’re releasing to be “re-settled”:
The 11 detainees were identified as: Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, Khalid Ahmed Qassim, Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani, Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah, Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bib Attash, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, and Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah.
Ahmed al-Alwi, an alleged al Qaeda fighter and part of the security detail for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, was one of the 11 men released, the New York Post reported.
In 2016, a declassified document said al-Alwi made several statements that suggested that he "maintains an extremist mindset."
Anam al Sharabi, another alleged bin Laden bodyguard, was also released. A 2020 declassified file said he was bin Laden's bodyguard and trained in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.
He also "may have been associated with an aborted 9/11-style hijacking in Southwest Asia led by al-Qa'ida external operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed."
What could go wrong?
It’s clear that Biden no longer gives a damn and is willing to harm America due to his (and Jill’s) endless bitterness because he was denied a second term.
