PrairiePundit

 Daily Mail: Donald Trump issued two executive orders in his first hours back in office - that will launch investigations into Joe Biden 's White House - over institutional censorship and weaponization of law enforcement. The president signed at least 78 bills on Monday overturning various declarations and orders enacted by his predecessor. Hours after he was sworn back in, Trump ordered that no federal officer, employee or agent may unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen, an early step toward his campaign promise to dismantle what he called government 'censorship' of U.S. citizens . The president´s executive order comes after Trump and his supporters have accused the federal government of pressuring social media companies to take down lawful posts over concerns around misinformation. The order also instructs the attorney general, in consultation with other executive agency heads, to investigate how federal government actions over the four ye...

 NY Post: Watchdog sues State Department for records on censorship efforts, funding for ad ‘blacklist’ that included The Post The State Department has been hit with a lawsuit demanding records pertaining to its now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC) subagency, which leaned on social media companies to suppress Americans’ free speech and funneled US taxpayers’ money to groups even trying to “blacklist” The Post. The Functional Government Initiative watchdog group filed the suit Monday to obtain potentially damning US government communications — following months of stonewalling by the agency about its grants under President Biden that backed the censorship efforts. “Just because the GEC is shutting its doors, it doesn’t mean FGI is shutting down our investigation,” said FGI spokesman Peter McGinnis. “The layers of the Biden-Harris State Department’s censorship industrial complex must be exposed so that all which occurred in 2020, along with any attempts to suppress free speech du...

 Town Hall: Democrats have come up with the wild new conspiracy theory that Elon Musk is actually the co-president and calling the shots, as opposed to President-elect Donald Trump. This is all because he dared to use his platform of X to amplify his opposition and that of the American people to the over 1,500 page spending bill that had been released on Tuesday night and has since failed. CNN also discussed such a theory on Thursday, with Scott Jennings weighing in on multiple programs. "CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip" began with Phillip framing the spending bill fight in such a matter as one where "there is no solution in sight after Donald Trump and Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan spending bill." Although "Plan B" failed on Thursday night, it looks like Republicans have since come up with and are trying to figure out a "Plan C." There's also an interim spending bill being debated. Phillip also brought up how Democrats have been using th...

 Bradley Smith: The reelection of President Donald Trump could serve as a historic turning point for free speech in America. President Trump has said he will investigate censorship practices by the federal government, end the rampant disrespect for First Amendment rights on our college campuses, and take on Big Tech’s Orwellian policing of speech on the Internet. If successful, these efforts would make the First Amendment stronger than ever before. Yet President Trump’s opponents will not simply stand by and watch as he dismantles their carefully crafted censorship machine. Controlling who gets to speak and what can be said is essential to the left’s dominance over our institutions. They will not give up such an important source of their power without a fight. To ensure the success of Trump’s free speech agenda, the right must anticipate and prepare for the left’s inevitable attacks. Fortunately, their methods are not hard to predict. In fact, Democrats tipped their hand during th...

 Blaze: Smith & Wesson thanks Elon Musk for X platform after Facebook suspends its account indefinitely  Musk has said that X will protect free speech despite calls for censorship. The right to keep arms is guaranteed in the Constitution along with the right to free speech.  Too often some social media has been arbitrary and capricious when it comes to those rights.  Musk has been a champion of those rights.

 Newsmax: The senior Republican commissioner on the FCC is demanding that Big Tech companies fess up about their censorship activities targeting conservatives during the Biden years. In a letter sent Wednesday and obtained by Newsmax, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote to the CEOs at the four largest tech companies — Apple's Tim Cook, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai — demanding information about the censorship activities. Carr began his letter, "Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship" adding, "Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct." He noted that their companies and others "silenced Americans" for simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Carr also lambasted the tech companies for working with so-called "media monitors" and other "fact-checkers." ... In his letter, Carr asserted that these ...

 The Hill: ... ... A would-be assassin shot and wounded Trump in Butler, Pa. on July 13. Many of the details of that assassination attempt are still being covered up by the Biden administration and the leadership of the Secret Service. That violent act impelled Elon Musk — owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X — to jump in with both feet, not only to endorse Trump but to support him with every means at his disposal. In some very real ways, the relationship between Musk and Trump became symbiotic. While both were highly successful and accomplished, both potentially had a great deal to lose if Vice President Kamala Harris — and the far-left team behind her — won the presidency. Trump has been dealing for years with Russian collusion hoaxes; fabricated lawfare charges; an armed FBI raid on his home in Florida; and the specter of endless legal assaults from the Democrats against him and his family. Musk had been free of all those threats until he bought Twitter, rebranded it as “X” and then ope...

 Streiff: A group of eleven former Republican prosecutors and elected officials have asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to  open an investigation  into Elon Musk for paying registered voters in seven states to sign a petition supporting the First and Second Amendments. See  Elon Musk Giving Away Millions to Promote Petition Supporting First and Second Amendments . ... So far, the Department of Justice hasn't commented, but it is hard to believe that someone in Garland's Sicherheitsdienst won't seize the opportunity to launch a pre-dawn raid on one of Musk's homes just for the photo-op. The whole issue is rather nuts, so it is no great shock that UCLA Law Professor Rick Hasen is up to his unibrow in this lawfare.   ... Hasen dishonestly tries to bootstrap gifting registered voters of either party, whether or not they have ever voted, for signing a petition into "vote buying" or paying people to register to vote. I suppose if you tie any law to the rack and ...

 DC Daily Journal: ... Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has called on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to clarify its stance on political censorship practices that came to light during the 2020 election. In a letter sent on Tuesday, Marshall, along with Republican Senators Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, urged CISA Director Jen Easterly to reassess the agency’s previous handling of Americans’ speech to prevent future conflicts with the First Amendment. The senators’ letter, obtained first by reporters with the Daily Caller , highlights concerns that CISA collaborated with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to pressure social media platforms into censoring political discourse. Marshall criticized these actions, stating, “CISA has previously been caught pressuring social media and internet platforms to censor content, blatantly violating the First Amendment. Any effort by the Harris-Biden administration to silence fa...

 Kevin Downey, Jr.: How do you go from being a darling to the left to their public enemy #1? Embrace free speech. Elon Musk was hailed a hero for his electric automobile company, Tesla, which many prairie fairies embraced as the first nail in the coffin of fossil fuels. But purchasing Twitter, rebranding it as X, and bringing free speech back to the former commie-controlled social media platform, set the encephalon-free, bolshevik Black Handers into a raging tiz-woz, and Musk is now considered Señor Spailpín. ... Musk recently told fellow patriotic pariah Tucker Carlson that if Kamala Harris wins the November election, we may never have a fair election again. "My prediction is if there’s another four years of a Democrat administration, they will legalize so many illegals that are there that the next election there won’t be any swing states,” Musk predicted to Carlson. “And we’ll be a single-party country just like California is a single-party state. It’s a super majority Dem stat...

 Red State: One of the things that Elon Musk just warned about at former President Donald Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was the danger that the Democrats posed to free speech and how important it was to vote for Trump to preserve our Constitutional rights. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton let the cat out of the bag during an interview with CNN on Saturday, where she spoke about the need to control social media. She said it should be "at the top" of every legislative agenda: ... "We lose total control." That's the real problem to them right there, that's why Democrats are so upset. Yes, that's the point of the First Amendment -- the government is not supposed to be in "control" of the speech of the people. Sounds pretty fascistic to me. People can now see and hear the truth without having it be filtered through liberal media organs. We can now know when the media is lying to us. We may all have -- gasp -- freedom of thought and not agree...

 PJ Media: Illegal DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith wants Twitter jail to be physical. His new election-interfering filing against Donald Trump essentially argues that Trump’s free speech should be considered criminal. Challenging the integrity of election results is almost as old as the United States itself, and Democrats have most certainly been claiming that elections are fraudulent or illegitimate since Andrew Jackson. Remember when Hillary Clinton and her supporters claimed that the 2016 election was a fraud? Jack Smith apparently does not, because his new filing against Trump argues that Trump’s speech, including his tweets, about election integrity and election fraud is reason to prosecute and convict the former president. The First Amendment protects Americans’ free speech when criticizing the government and criticizing elections. In America, you have always been allowed to claim that you thought elections were fraudulent, whether that is true or not. It’s a First Amendment ...

 Jeff Charles: Former Secretary of State John Kerry recently argued that the First Amendment is an obstacle for government agencies to crack down on supposed “misinformation” and “disinformation." Kerry’s comments were made during a panel at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in New York City. He started by noting that the “dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing,” which is “part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue.” Kerry lamented that “The referees we used to have to determine what's a fact and what isn't a fact, they've been eviscerated to a certain degree. People go and then people self-select where they go for their news or for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle.” The former presidential candidate continued, explaining that it is more difficult to come to an agreement than it was in the past because of a more democratized media environme...

 NY Post: The State Department is using taxpayer money to smear its critics — the ones who exposed its funding of pro-censorship groups that target right-wing news organizations, including The Post, under the guise of combating “disinformation.” A bombshell Committee on Small Business report confirmed the reporting of independent journo Matt Taibbi and the Washington Examiner : “The Federal government has fueled a censorship ecosystem impacting not only individuals’ First Amendment rights, but the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.” One group, Global Disinformation Index, created a “blacklist” of conservative publications for advertisers to avoid, smearing The Post and other major news outlets as “risky” possible spreaders of false info. GDI received $100,000 from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center between October 2021 and March 2022. Another group mentioned in the report, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, maintained a private email list tha...

 DC Daily Journal: ... In a chilling display of government overreach, a group of Christian pro-life activists, including an 89-year-old survivor of a communist prison camp, now face the prospect of over a decade behind bars. Their crime? Daring to stand up for the unborn in an era where the Biden administration seems bent on punishing those who oppose its radical pro-abortion agenda. The activists — Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, Cal Zastrow, his daughter Eva Zastrow, and 89-year-old Eva Edl — were found guilty by a federal jury in Michigan of conspiring against rights and violating the FACE Act. Edl, who survived a Yugoslavian communist prison camp under dictator Josip Broz Tito as a young child before fleeing to the United States, now faces the terrifying possibility of returning to prison in her twilight years, thanks to a Justice Department more interested in silencing dissent than upholding justice. The Biden administration, in a move that reeks...

 Twitchy: European Commission Tries Threatening Twitter/X With SKEERY Letter and Elon Musk Just Has 1 Word for Them Musk was not going along with an attempt to censor speech in the US.  See  also: Sudden illegal attack on the Trump campaign throws Washington, D.C. into complete hysteria ...  Former President Trump’s campaign confirmed on Saturday that its internal communications were hacked, marking yet another instance where foreign adversaries are targeting the leader who once stood up to them with unwavering resolve. ...  “On Friday, a new report from Microsoft found that Iranian hackers broke into the account of a ‘high ranking official’ on the U.S. presidential campaign in June 2024, which coincides with the close timing of President Trump’s selection of a Vice Presidential nominee.” ... And:   European Tech Regulator Threatens to Punish Elon Musk, X for Airing Trump Interview This is an absurd case.  The European regulators are attempting to impo...

  Business Insider: The advertising trade group The World Federation of Advertisers told its members on Thursday that it was "discontinuing" activities for its Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X against the company earlier this week. Stephan Loerke, the CEO of the WFA, wrote in an email to members, seen by Business Insider, that the decision was "not made lightly" but that GARM is a not-for-profit organization with limited resources. Loerke said that the WFA and GARM intended to contest the allegations in X's suit in court and were confident the outcome of the case would "demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities." The news came just two days after X filed an antitrust suit in a Texas court, which alleged that GARM's members illegally colluded to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from Twitter, now known...

 Jonathon Turley: ... The 2024 election is looking strikingly similar to the election of 1800 and, if so, it does not bode well for Biden. In my book " The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage ," released last week, I discuss our long struggle with free speech as a nation. It is an unvarnished history with powerful stories of our heroes and villains in the struggle to define what Justice Louis Brandeis called our "indispensable right." One of the greatest villains in that history was President John Adams, who used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his political opponents – including journalists, members of Congress and others. Many of those prosecuted by the Adams administration were Jeffersonians. In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson ran on the issue and defeated Adams. We are now seeing what is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in our history. President Joe Biden is, in my view, the most anti-free speech president sinc...