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Trump Censorship Machine Loses Again in Court

The Trump administration’s crusade to crush campus criticism took another wallop on Friday in a California courtroom. Federal judge Noël Wise ruled that the Trump administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” brazenly violated the US Constitution.

The Stanford Daily—one of the best-known college student newspapers in the nation—sued the Trump administration for changing its “immigration policy and pattern of enforcement, namely by arresting, detaining, and deporting students with F-1 visas when those students use their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government does not like.” It asserted that the Trump administration’s “actions have specifically impacted Stanford Daily by decreasing the quantity and diversity of opinion pieces The Stanford Daily is able to publish on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Foreign students who had written on the issue requested that their previous articles be deleted, and other foreign students were no longer willing to comment on hot issues.

The Trump administration claims unlimited discretion to silence foreign students by deporting those whose opinions it disapproves of. Judge Wise wrote, “The language of the [First] Amendment makes clear that it is not the government that gives freedom of speech to the people. Instead, that freedom is imbued in the people. . . . It is not the government’s to take.” This is a notion that conservatives instinctively understand when it comes to the Second Amendment and the right of self-defense. But many people fail to recognize the same right for freedom of speech. Conor Fitzpatrick—the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which represented the student newspaper, declared, “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff clarified the scope of the ruling:

This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out.

George Porteous—Editor in Chief of Stanford Daily—hailed the decision: “The reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today’s victory means they won’t have to.” But it remains to be seen whether this latest judicial rebuff slows the Trump censorship juggernaut.

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Sulzbergers Keep Secret Archives at Taxpayer Expense While Denouncing Supreme Court for Doing the Same Thing

A highly hyped New York Times investigation—touted with the unusual label “Times Exclusive”—appeared this month under the headline “How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History.” It complained that “many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come.”

“Some scholars question why papers should be sealed long after a justice has retired,” says the Times article, by Jodi Kantor, with research and reporting contributed by Julie Tate, Ann Marimow, and Adam Liptak. It quoted a legal historian at the University of California, Davis, Mary Ziegler, accusing the justices of engaging in “reputation management,” and, as Ziegler was paraphrased in the article, “protecting themselves from examination and second-guessing.”

Not disclosed in the Times article: that the papers of former Times publishers Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., donated to the New York Public Library in 2007, are closed to public access until 2035 and 2057, respectively, according to the finding aid to the collection.

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Court Forbids Mom to Take Daughter, 13, to Normal Christian Church – Used the Word ‘Cult’ in Official Docs

The Maine Supreme Court this week upheld a lower court ruling preventing a mother from taking her 13-year-old daughter to a church it referred to as a “cult.”

The decision could set a bad precedent for other jurisdictions to grab onto nationwide. But the religious liberty law firm representing the mother, Emily Westbrook, in the case has promised an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A look at Calvary Chapel of Greater Portland’s doctrines and description in the court opinion makes it sound like it believes in pretty standard Bible-based teaching: the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God; the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit); original sin; salvation through Jesus Christ; the Second Coming; and the rest.

Maine affiliate WMTW-TV reported that Westbrook challenged a 2024 custody order prohibiting her from taking her daughter to Calvary Chapel, arguing it violates her right to free exercise of religion guaranteed under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“A district court judge sided with the child’s father, Matthew Bradeen, ruling that some of the church’s teachings could be psychologically harmful to the girl. The order allows Bradeen to solely decide on his daughter’s involvement with Calvary Chapel Church. When it comes to any other religious organization, the order states that the parents share rights and must discuss decisions,” WMTW further noted.

The Maine Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision Tuesday upholding the lower court’s order, said, “We are also unpersuaded by Bickford’s claim that the court evinced hostility toward her religion by describing her church in offensive terms, including referring to it as a ‘cult.’ The court used the word ‘cult’ only in describing the testimony of [Janja] Lalich, the stipulated expert on ‘cults.’”

“The court noted that ‘cult’ serves as a shorthand for what sociologists like Lalich call ‘closed social systems’ and that Lalich identified Bickford’s church as one of these systems. The court used ‘cult’ in summarizing Lalich’s testimony, but it did not otherwise refer to Bickford’s church as a cult or a closed social system,” the justices added.

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It’s Not Just Flock. Police Can’t Be Trusted With Our Data.

Agrowing movement has been campaigning against surveillance cameras from companies like Flock Safety, which allow local police to gather mass surveillance data, often citing the possibility of misuse of that data. But for years police have steadily been building a digital infrastructure with personal information on people with criminal backgrounds in the name of public safety — and often without proper digital security

Since 2020, the state police in Illinois have maintained a publicly accessible online map of 30,000 people that it has labeled as “offenders” in 685 nursing homes across the state. The map included the first and last names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, FBI numbers, and Social Security numbers of people listed. These are elderly people who are vulnerable to scammers. It’s not stated what they have been convicted of. They may have a drug charge from decades ago before marijuana was legalized in Illinois, but their past still follows them.

Matt Chapman, a researcher with the Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs, stumbled across the map when he was researching license plate readers maintained by the Illinois State Police (ISP). “Anybody can find this,” Chapman told Truthout. “Anybody can use this for nefarious purposes.”

“Why do these agencies have all this information?” Chapman questioned. “Why are they not protecting it? It really speaks to the lack of care that Illinois State Police have for the information of sensitive folks — the people they’re supposedly supposed to protect.”

Registries, Databases, and Shackles

As police build an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus, they have been shown to be poor stewards of the mass amounts of information they collect on the public. Police have also wrongly entered people into gang databases. In 2020, a scandal erupted in Los Angeles after cops there falsified records in a gang database, which led to the suspension of several officers with the city’s police department. Last year, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessed information from a disgraced Maryland cop who put him into a gang database linking him to M-13 for wearing a hoodie and Chicago Bulls baseball cap.

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Biden-Appointed Judge Blocks Trump from Narrowing Birthright Citizenship

A federal judge, appointed by former President Joe Biden, is blocking President Donald Trump from narrowing birthright citizenship to exclude the United States-born children of foreign enemies of the U.S., members of foreign terrorist organizations, and others who lobby on behalf of foreign governments.

On Thursday, Judge Deborah Boardman, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland by Biden in 2021, issued a preliminary injunction — stopping Trump’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship to exclude certain classes of foreign nationals.

“The 2026 Executive Order is almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class for the simple reason that the Supreme Court in Barbara already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth. This Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them,” Boardman writes:

The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are “citizens at birth.” Barbara is the law of the land. The President must follow it. The plaintiffs have established a strong likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the 2026 Executive Order violates the class members’ Fourteenth Amendment right to citizenship. [Emphasis added]

In June, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Barbara that barring birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens and temporary foreign visitors is a violation of the 14th Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion for the minority, argued that the 14th Amendment’s phrase “not subject to any foreign power” in regard to guaranteeing citizenship to those born in the U.S. “excluded from citizenship children of foreign temporary visitors, who were subject to the power of their home nation.”

As a result of the decision, Trump, in August, signed an executive order to narrow who is privileged with birthright American citizenship, excluding the U.S.-born children of foreign terrorists and employees of foreign governments, among other classes of people.

The case is CASA v. Trump, No. DLB-25-201 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

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Democrats Cry Foul As DHS Launches Voter Fraud Probe In 9 States

The Department of Homeland Security opened a coordinated voter fraud investigation across nine states this week, and Democratic election officials are not taking the news well…

CNN reported that internal federal guidance directs Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to build criminal cases against people suspected of illegally registering or voting. The effort is described as a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative” and will run from early September through mid-October.

Agents began work Tuesday in Washington, Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York and Connecticut.

The operation targets noncitizens who registered or cast ballots, including immigrants accused of voting before they naturalized. DHS has directed investigators to coordinate with US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which means a noncitizen caught voting faces more than a fine. Criminal charges, a denied citizenship application and deportation are all on the table.

The enforcement push runs through DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, which lets states cross-check voter rolls against federal citizenship and immigration records. Mullin announced in July that states seeking DHS election-related grants must run their rolls through SAVE as a condition of funding.

“Working with Secretary Lutnick, we are going to make our security enhancements mandatory,” Mullin said.

“The machines have to be secured, and your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed. We need to make sure that individuals that are legally able to vote are voting.”

Skeptics might ask whether any of this produces actual prosecutions. It has. Recent federal cases include a Honduran illegal alien arrested for voting in seven federal elections dating back to 2008, a Mexican national who pleaded guilty after falsely claiming citizenship, an Australian national arrested for voting in multiple federal elections, a Chinese national facing voter fraud charges and an illegal alien sentenced for voting under a stolen identity for more than two decades.

While Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said it would comply with the investigation, officials in the targeted Democratic-run states denounced the operation almost immediately.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office called the operation part of “a broader effort to intimidate Californians” and dismissed DHS’s findings as “seemingly baseless.”

Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas struck a more careful tone, saying she welcomed “any investigation into election malfeasance” while hoping the intent was to find wrongdoing rather than “create chaos.” 

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said he learned about the probe from media reports and complained DHS never contacted his office. “It’s troubling that Homeland Security is wasting taxpayer dollars investigating a phenomenon we know to be false,” Hobbs said, calling the operation “another attempt by the federal government to cause chaos and confusion ahead of the midterms.” 

Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called the probe “a joke” and told Trump to “stay out of it because voting is a state issue and not a federal issue.” 

New Jersey offers the cleanest test case of the whole fight. The Trump administration identified at least 35,000 potential noncitizen registered voters in the state. In July, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill tried to get ahead of the story by admitting the state had 6,600 registered noncitizen voters herself. But then she refused to hand voter data over to the Trump administration. 

 “While ICE Homeland Security Investigations is not able to comment on any active investigations, HSI is actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences—including criminal charges and deportation.”

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All Bubbles End In Deflation

So far…the Bubble in the US is broader than any in history. It has been inflating everything it touched for the last 30 years.

All bubbles pop, of course. How they pop is the confusing whirlwind we enter today.

But don’t worry. Even in the worst crash, real wealth doesn’t disappear, it just changes hands. When the stock market goes down, those with stocks have less paper wealth…and less of a claim on real wealth. They are ‘poorer.’ That leaves those without stocks relatively richer. They have a bigger claim on the real goods and services the economy produces.

The feds and their elite cronies have a good racket going…diddling markets so as to shift more and more wealth away from the public and towards themselves. They own most of the capital assets…and they control the US budget. Pressuring interest rates lower, and backing up the stock market with bailouts and ‘put’ options…they’ve gotten richer and richer. As we saw last week, at today’s prices the stockholding class can theoretically buy twice the GDP…and have $10 trillion left over.

It wasn’t capitalism that made them so rich; it was a corrupt money system. And if the dogs of capitalism were unleashed, they’d have their fake money fortunes for dinner. Interest rates would be set by honest savers and borrowers — not by Fed policy decisions. Prices would be determined by buyers and sellers; the budget would be balanced; the debt would be cleaned up; the troops would come home; inflation would disappear; and the Baltimore O’s would win the World Series.

But of course, we’re dreaming.

Sticking to the real world…

Our high confidence guess is that the bubble will deflate. Everything will fall in price. Then, the feds will panic. They will do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop markets from doing their work — with more fake money, lower interest rates, yield curve control, quantitative easing. And probably some tricks we haven’t heard of yet.

After an initial sell-off, gold will go up. It will sniff out what is coming — more inflation. Other real asset prices too — from hot dogs to hotels — will get a whiff of the coming price hikes. Consumer prices will rise as ‘inflation expectations’ increase.

The feds really only have one tool — fake money. In a crisis, they will produce more of it…a lot more. And, in addition to the quantity of money coming into the economy, there’s another key inflation variable: the velocity of money. A dollar spent two times in a year is counted twice.

When people think the feds are going to print money, the dollar becomes a hot potato. They aim to get rid of it as soon as possible. Sales go up in the short run. In the longer run, the economy is destroyed.

And here’s an important addendum. We say ‘inflate or die.’ But those are just policy choices. In the long run, you can inflate all you want. The bubble will still die — a later, more gruesome death.

In the fight between markets on one side…and politicians, grifters, fixers and central planners on the other…markets always win, eventually. They win by deflation.

Even in an inflationary blow off — with prices soaring — real prices fall. Consumer prices rise, in nominal currency. But gold — real money — typically rises even more…so that in gold terms, real things actually become cheaper. Prices deflate in real terms.

Observers in Germany’s record-setting hyperinflation remarked that foreigners were able to use dollars — then, backed by gold — to buy things at absurdly low prices. By November, 1923, a dollar was equal to 4.2 trillion marks. This made American visitors trillionaires (in marks) allowing them to buy whole houses for the price of a magazine subscription. In real terms, prices had deflated down to almost nothing.

We witnessed it, ourselves, in Argentina. In pesos, consumer prices more than doubled every twelve months…but dollars (even with a dodgy dollar) made them cheaper than ever. We would go to a restaurant, for example, and feel guilty about paying so little for such a good meal.

The same phenomenon is already taking place in America, too. Housing has gotten much more expensive, right? And the stock market is much higher too, right? But looked at in terms of gold, stocks are less than half of what they were worth in 1999…and the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, expressed in gold, shows house prices down about 80% over the last quarter century.

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JD Vance’s Mom Blasts Abdul El-Sayed Over Racial Smears About Her Family: ‘That Man’s an Idiot’

Egyptian-American Muslim and Democrat Michigan Senate nominee Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed (aka Abdul El-Sayed) has been running around for months smearing Vice President JD Vance’s family as racist. Earlier this week, Vance himself struck back. On Wednesday, Vance’s mother, Beverly Vance Adkins, shared her own blunt thoughts.

“I think that man’s an idiot,” she said during an interview on OutKick’s Tomi Lahren is Fearless.

Of her grandkids, she added: “Those are my babies. I love those babies and would do anything for any of them. And I love Usha as if she were my own daughter. She’s one of the best, most genuine people I’ve ever met. And she loves my son, and she’s a good mother. And I don’t pay attention to people like [El-Sayed].”

“I think they’re jealous, honestly. I mean, JD is 42 years old. He’s handsome. He’s the vice president of the United States. He’s got a beautiful wife, four beautiful children, and jealousy is the only thing I can think of,” she added. “Yeah. So, I mean, he can take all the shots he wants. It’s going to go, you know, it’s going to get no merit from any of us.”

“I mean, it makes me mad, honestly, because he doesn’t know JD and he doesn’t know, you know, what type of person he is, and I do,” she continued, “but in the long run, I’m not going to do anything about it. I mean, you know, I’d probably punch the guy if I ever seen him, and then that would get me in trouble. So, I’ll just go with the flow.”

What El-Sayed has said these past few months with his relentless attacks on Vance’s family is simply beyond the pale.

“So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no?” El-Sayed asked rhetorically, insinuating Vance’s grandfather would reject Usha Vance because of her Indian heritage.

El-Sayed also urged Usha to dump her husband, saying the vice president has the “charisma of a doorknob” and the “aura of a toad.”

El-Sayed has gone so far as to say Vance looks at his mixed-race kids as something “less American.”

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Air Force Officer Exposes the Truth to Her Command and Faces Retaliation

An Air Force officer bravely stepped forward to confront the injustices that plagued her fellow service members, only to find herself in the crosshairs.

This is yet another instance of a service member voicing concerns regarding misconduct within their command, which included accusations of toxic leadership, favoritism, harassment, and a failure in accountability, only to encounter harsh retaliation for speaking up.

The Gateway Pundit spoke to Lt. Col. Natalie A. Rowell of the California Air National Guard. With 33 years of service to the country, she most recently held the position of 195th Force Support Flight Commander at Beale Air Force Base.

From this position, she observed various troubling issues named above. Throughout the years, she had consistently dedicated herself to enhancing the military. Consequently, she views herself as having been “a whistleblower entrenched in California for quite some time.”

In September 2024, she brought one of her concerns to Major General Matthew P. Beevers, the Adjutant General overseeing the California National Guard and the entire California Military Department, which includes both Army and Air National Guard units.

She conveyed that his Selective Retention Review Board (SRRB) was not being carried out appropriately. The SRRB is a committee assembled by the military to assess the records of service members who are eligible for ongoing service but may not be retained. This process can be initiated due to reasons such as length of service, force restructuring, or particular performance issues, and is not intended for punitive measures.

“It was affecting people, even to the point that some were suicidal,” she disclosed, stressing that this was the reason she felt compelled to voice her concerns.

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‘Crisis Preparedness’: Dutch Move Billions In Gold Out Of US As Goldman Warns Of ‘Geographic Concentration Risk’

The Netherlands’ central bank transferred nearly 90 metric tons of gold bars from the United States and Canada to Britain amid growing concerns of “increasing geopolitical unrest,” according to CNBC.

“With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves. We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness,” DNB Governor Olaf Sleijpen said of the development.

Roughly 25% of the gold reserves stored in New York and Ottawa were moved to London over the summer.

CNBC reports:

The transferred gold is now stored with the Bank of England because gold stored there must meet international trade standards and is recognized as “the world’s most easily tradable gold,” DNB said, adding that the move strengthens its “crisis preparedness.”

By contrast, DNB said the gold bars held in the U.S. and Canada could not be utilized as quickly and directly in a crisis situation.

The bank holds 30.8% of its 612.4 tons of gold reserves at its cash center in Zeist, southeast of Amsterdam.

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