Life, Liberty, Property #41: Biden’s media intimidation crusade takes a turn for the worse, as the White House recruits “hundreds of staffers and volunteers to monitor platforms.”
by S.T. Karnick
IN THIS ISSUE:
- Biden’s Media Intimidation Crusade Takes a Turn for the Worse
- Everything’s Big in Texas—Except School Choice
- Kansas City Taxpayer Barbecue
- The Costly Regulatory State
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Biden’s Media Intimidation Crusade Takes a Turn for the Worse
The Biden administration’s efforts to intimidate media outlets into censoring information that might paint the president in a bad light (other than his own gaffes, lies, and plagiarism) received new and much-needed attention last week. The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reconvened on Thursday to look into “the federal government’s involvement in social media censorship” and “recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression,” according to the committee’s press release.
It is a timely investigation. As Byron York noted at the Washington Examiner, “President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign is ‘overhauling’ its strategy to fight ‘misinformation’ on social media. The new effort includes ‘recruiting hundreds of staffers and volunteers to monitor platforms.’”
The Biden team’s big current concern is the economy. Somehow, the public just isn’t getting the message that everything is hunky-dory and that Biden is the reason we’re all supposedly so much richer than we were in January 2021. Yet even those who admit to having voted for Biden in 2020 say the economy is awful.
The new operation is reminiscent of the Biden administration’s successful efforts in 2021 to persuade media companies to suppress unpopular observations about government initiatives, especially doubts about the science behind combatting COVID-19 and concerns about interference in the 2020 election. That was, in fact, a ruthless campaign of threats and intimidation against tech companies, the legality of which the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide in its current session.
“They were bullying companies to censor anything contradicting government guidance,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. “The private intimidation was amplified by public threats to use antitrust action and regulation if tech companies didn’t follow orders.”
The Biden administration has continually turned up the heat on those who dare to say things that might undermine the president’s re-election prospects.
In the spring of 2022, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced he was forming a Disinformation Governance Board, which a writer at The Hill aptly described as an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.” The DHS shut down the board under pressure, but its work continued in other DHS sub-agencies, including the Secret Service, The Intercept reported.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people illegally enter the country each month while Mayorkas’ vigilant border guardians keep their eyes peeled for embarrassing tweets.
The Department of Defense in May contracted with a firm owned by “a researcher who applauded Twitter for censoring stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, to ‘proactively respond’ to international disinformation campaigns” by providing “a software tool that tracks global disinformation campaigns,” The Washington Free Beacon reported. The Pentagon also made “other controversial grants this year to organizations that support censorship of so-called disinformation,” the paper said.
The Department of Health and Human Services has created a “Surgeon General’s Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation,” which “provides specific guidance and resources for health care providers, educators, librarians, faith leaders, and trusted community members to understand, identify, and stop the spread of health misinformation in their communities.” Think of it as the first step toward a nationwide Soviet-style snitch culture for health care.
Similar efforts are under way across the federal bureaucracy. All of this came about after Biden’s campaign apparatus in 2020 successfully conspired with social media companies to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story, which a significant percentage of voters later said would have changed their decision about whether to vote for Joe Biden for president.
Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign is now conducting a similar operation, led by deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, who ran the White House censorship squad in 2021.
Flaherty’s appointment to lead this “anti-misinformation” crusade is an obvious intimidation ploy. It sends a clear message that the Biden administration is taking names and will do all it can to punish media organizations that do not comply with the campaign team’s “requests.”
As a private effort (though subject to political campaign laws), this undertaking is legally different from the operations that took place in the White House in 2021, but it is morally just as corrupt.
The current campaign of bullying is even worse than the variations in 2020 and from 2021 to the present, because it combines the freedom of the 2020 version with the explicit power dynamic of the subsequent efforts directed by the White House. The use of benevolent-sounding words to mask this harassment and intimidation is proof that those behind it know exactly how abhorrent it is.
An earlier version of this article was published by The Blaze. Reprinted with permission.
Sources: Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Judiciary Committee, U.S. House of Representatives; Washington Examiner; The New York Times
Everything’s Big in Texas—Except School Choice
States across the nation made major progress on school choice this year, but unfortunately the biggest hoped-for prize eluded reform. The Texas House of Representatives removed universal school choice from HB1, a 177-page education reform bill that included major spending increases and other perks for the education establishment, in a special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott.
As in years past, Republicans killed the bill. In the Republican-controlled House, all the Democrats voted for the amendment to remove the proposed choice plan, and 21 Republicans joined them. That made the difference.
“That section would have allowed parents to make use of the equivalent of 75% of the cost of sending the student to public school to instead help pay for the educational institution of their choice,” the Catholic News Agency reported.
Abbott has been a strong advocate of education choice and called the special session of the legislature to pass an education savings account (ESA) plan. The Republicans larded the bill up with goodies for the education establishment, notably $7 billion in additional funding, including a large, $4,000 per-teacher pay raise, in hopes of buying opponents’ silence and encouraging the Republican choice opponents to go along with the plan.
The bribe did not work. The bill went back to committee after the House voted down the version without the ESA component. The state Senate has already passed a bill to grant universal school choice.
The Republican supporters of the amendment voted against their constituents’ stated wishes. “Eighty-eight percent of Texas Republican primary voters supported a nonbinding school choice ballot proposition last year,” wrote the American Federation for Children’s Cory DeAngelis and Nathan Cunneen at Fox News. “Numerous polls show widespread support from Texans of nearly all demographics.”
“Eighteen of the twenty-one Republicans were endorsed by the Texas affiliate of the nation’s largest teacher’s union,” DeAngelis and Cunneen note.
It appears likely that these choice opponents’ constituents will hear about this. Last year in Iowa, House Republicans blocked a modest school choice proposal supported by Gov. Kim Reynolds. The governor and school choice proponents successfully challenged those lawmakers in the primaries soon after, and the legislature handily passed a much more extensive school choice bill this year.
The same process could take place in Texas. “School choice was thirteen votes away from victory, and already, twelve challengers to anti-school choice incumbents have announced their candidacy,” DeAngelis and Cunneen write. “Many of them will have the support of Governor Abbott, Senator Ted Cruz, and other political powerhouses in Texas.”
Sources: Fox News; Catholic News Agency
Kansas City Taxpayer Barbecue
I am shocked, shocked to hear that another proposed stadium deal is likely to cost far more than its proponents claim.
The taxpayer cost for the proposed new ballpark for the Kansas City Royals is being severely lowballed, The Kansas City Star reports:
A new Royals ballpark in downtown Kansas City would cost Jackson County taxpayers far more than its $1 billion sticker price.
It’ll be more like $4.4 billion to $6.4 billion, if the stadium sales tax and other payments required by the current lease agreement extended 40 years beyond its expiration date in 2031, as the Royals have suggested.
That’s according to a confidential financial analysis conducted by Jackson County Executive Frank White’s office that was sent to county legislators this week and obtained by The Star.
Of course, if the taxpayers do not pony up, the Royals might leave, and Kansas City will be a minor league town. When people around the country hear of Kansas City, they will think of cattle wandering through the streets, tumbleweeds rolling past the livery stable, yokels cheating each other at checkers on the porch outside the general store, and rusting, abandoned tractors in the downtown parking lots. What sane person would balk at spending a mere $4 billion to $6 billion to avoid that?
Source: The Kansas City Star
The Costly Regulatory State
Federal regulations impose an annual cost of $1.939 trillion per year on American businesses and families, according to the latest annual report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), titled Ten Thousand Commandments: A Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.
That cost is in addition to an estimated $9.3 trillion in federal, state, and local taxes for fiscal year 2024, plus a federal deficit that is likely to be $1.5 trillion or more and will cost taxpayers by pushing up interest rates.
The regulatory cost alone amounts to more than $14,500 per household and about 7.4 percent of GDP, CEI notes. Given that federal agencies habitually “low-ball costs and exaggerate benefits,” as CEI’s Ryan Young puts it, the actual numbers are surely much higher than this.
After a brief but significant decrease in regulation during the first three years of the Trump administration, President Joe Biden has injected into the federal regulatory state a massive shot of adrenaline laced with methamphetamine, especially through the “‘whole of government’ mandate initiated by the Biden administration that directs federal agencies to prioritize progressive political goals, like ‘equity’ and climate change, unrelated to and on top of the agency mission set by Congress,” study author Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. states in a news release about the report.
Make no mistake: Congress benefits when the Executive Branch fills in the details of the laws the legislature passes, Crews notes in the report:
One of the main enablers of regulatory growth is Congress’s delegation of its law-making power to executive branch regulatory agencies. Agencies have much less visibility than members of Congress and do not have to worry about upsetting voters or finding compromises with the other party. Additionally, many members of Congress are happy to have someone else to blame when regulations backfire or prove controversial.
If this sounds unconstitutional, that’s because it is, Crews writes:
Administrative agencies, not Congress, do most U.S. lawmaking, despite Article I of the Constitution stipulating otherwise. Congress is to blame here, as it routinely enacts weighty legislation that should be closely attended, then delegates substantial lawmaking power to agencies.
From an agency’s perspective, the primary measure of its productivity is the body of regulation it produces. That gives agencies ample incentive to expand turf by regulating even without an actual need for it.
Crews documents this trend in a data stream he aptly dubs the “Unconstitutionality Index”:
During calendar year 2022, while agencies issued 3,168 rules, Congress enacted 247 laws. Thus, agencies issued 13 rules for every law enacted by Congress. This “Unconstitutionality Index”—the ratio of regulations issued by agencies to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president—highlights the entrenched delegation of lawmaking power to unelected agency officials. The average ratio over the past 10 years is 22 rules for every law.
Crews is right to describe the current system as unconstitutional. All three branches of government have been complicit in this rise of unconstitutional regulation, as the Supreme Court has given agencies full benefit of the doubt in questions about the interpretation of statutes passed by Congress, in a principle known as Chevron deference.
The agencies have run wild with that permission, and Congress has generally gone along with the scam, for the reasons noted above. The Supreme Court is finally showing some interest in reconsidering Chevron, taking up four cases on the administrative state in the current term, including two that address the fact that many agency proceedings against businesses and individuals seem to conflict with the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury.
The Court should do all it can to rein in the administrative state—and then more. The current scheme is both unconstitutional and enormously destructive.
Sources: Competitive Enterprise Institute; Competitive Enterprise Institute; The Epoch Times; CNN
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