RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2024/12/18/opinion/benjamin-weingarten-congress-huge-spending-bill-sneaks-in-a-rescue-for-censors/

Just when Congress seemed poised to strike a blow against the Censorship-Industrial Complex, its 11th-hour maneuvering may have snatched defeat from the jaws of free-speech victory.

Tucked into the 1,547-page continuing resolution now before Congress to fund the government into March is a section titled “Global Engagement Center Extension.”

If not struck, it will prolong the life of a key government censorship cog that had been ticketed for closure.

The State Department recently indicated its plans to shutter the GEC in a court filing.

The department’s announced plan to “realign” the GEC’s staff and funding to other “foreign information manipulation and interference activities” already gave free speech champions pause — but any Deep State concession would have been significant.

GEC was formed to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation campaigns.

But like other parts of the fed-led censorship apparatus, the interagency entity underwent civil rights-eviscerating mission creep, expanding its mandate to suppress the speech of Americans guilty of wrongthink.

https://victorhanson.com/dronomania/

New Jersey is now subject to nonstop and often sensational civilian reports of swarms of nocturnal drones crossing city skies and violating the airspace of airports and military bases.

Terrified thousands demand to know what these drones are doing and to whom they belong.

In response, the Biden administration had initially kept mum.

Then, under mounting public pressure, it assured the public to be calm, given that most of the drones were likely launched by hobbyists and private citizens.

When that narrative failed to convince many, spokespeople pivoted to claims of mass hysteria and mistaken identity.

Amateur sightseers, they inferred, were subject to panic and hallucinations—supposedly wrongly confusing normal civilian and airline planes with drones.

Perhaps.

But as the sightings continued, more government narratives followed that the drones were unidentified but assuredly still harmless and certainly not foreign-operated.

Still, the mysterious sightings continued.

And the public’s initial curiosity soon turned to fear and finally to anger at their government’s silence, subsequent gaslighting, and final mendacity.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/20/biden-promised-a-return-to-normalcy-looks-like-trump-will-deliver-it/

What do a $15 million settlement with ABC News, a Washington, D.C., waitress getting fired, and the Los Angeles Times planning to include a bias meter in its news stories have in common?

They are all welcome signs that the nation is embracing normalcy once again – something that Joe Biden was allegedly going to restore after Donald Trump’s supposedly chaotic years.

Trump’s first term was chaotic, but not because of what he did so much as the four-year hysteria unleashed by his opponents.

Biden, on the other hand, brought true chaos. A tainted election, foreign wars, open borders, runaway inflation, exploding deficits, shortages, censorship, weaponized justice, incompetence, two assassination attempts, rising disunity, despair.

But now that the left’s unhinged efforts to silence conservative voices and block Trump’s reelection have been soundly defeated, a return to some semblance of normalcy is actually possible.

ABC News’ settlement – which includes a public apology in addition to the $15 million to settle a defamation case over “journalist” George Stephanopoulos’ repeated assertion that Trump had been found “liable for rape” – is a sign that news media can’t do or say whatever it wants to push an agenda.

https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-was-vilified-youth-gender-care?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The author uncovered the truth about the dangers of transitioning minors—and stood up to bans, boycotts, and smears.

Some researchers, who at great personal risk challenge the received wisdom of their day, never get the satisfaction of seeing their work vindicated. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened to Abigail Shrier.

Shrier is the author of the groundbreaking 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. It is a meticulous, humane, and harrowing account of the sudden and explosive rise in teenage girls declaring themselves to be males. The book is also an examination of a new branch of medicine that has encouraged, and profited from, swiftly putting these distressed girls on powerful hormones, and performing double mastectomies and other surgeries on them.

In working on the book, Shrier found that the claims that daughters could be, and should be, turned into sons was reckless, and that transgender medicine was functioning more like a cult than a scientifically based specialty. The truth of what she revealed has been comprehensively substantiated.

She documented how devastated parents were lied to and coerced. A favorite tactic of gender clinicians was to tell parents that if they didn’t consent to life-altering treatments with a long list of side effects, including sterility, their girls were likely to commit suicide. Parents were routinely asked, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?”