Tag: wrongthink

House Judiciary expands probe into allegations Biden admin spied on GOP members of Congress

ouse Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan expanded his committee’s investigation Monday into allegations that the Biden administration spied on Republican lawmakers. 

Revelations last year claimed the Biden FBI snooped on the phone records of multiple Republican members of Congress, including eight senators, during its January 6 investigation known as Arctic Frost. 

Jordan sent the latest letter to Alpine Bank CEO Glen Jammaron requesting documents and communications related to allegations that the Biden administration’s Department of Justice may have subpoenaed financial institutions for records of private customer data for Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert.

The letter asks the bank to produce documents and communications relating to any material sought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in relation to investigations about the 2020 presidential election.

It also sought documents and material related to Arctic Frost and activities conducted by former Special Counsel Jack Smith and asked for the material by no later than May 11.

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EFF Sues DHS and ICE For Records on Subpoenas Seeking to Unmask Online Critics

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today demanding public records about their use of administrative subpoenas to try to identify their online critics.

Court records and news reports show that in the past year, DHS has used administrative subpoenas to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests. The subpoenas are sent to technology companies to demand information about internet users who are often engaged in protected First Amendment activity.

These subpoenas are dangerous because they don’t require judges’ approval. But they are also unlawful, and the government knows it. When a few users challenged them in court with the help of American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision.

DHS and ICE have ignored EFF’s public-records requests for documents about the processes behind these subpoenas, so EFF sued Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“DHS and ICE should not be able to first claim that they have the legal authority to unmask critics and then run from court when users challenge these administrative subpoenas,” said EFF Deputy Legal Director Aaron Mackey. “The public deserves to know what laws the agencies believe give them the power to issue these speech-chilling subpoenas.”

An administrative subpoena cannot be used to obtain the content of communications, but they have been used to try and obtain some basic subscriber information like name, address, IP address, length of service, and session times. If a technology company refuses to comply, an agency’s only recourse is to drop it or go to court and try to convince a judge that the request is lawful.

EFF and the ACLU of Northern California in February ​wrote to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, SNAP, TikTok, and X​ to ask that they insist on court intervention and an order before complying with a DHS subpoena; give users as much notice as possible when they are the target of a subpoena, so the users can seek help; and resist gag orders that would prevent the companies from notifying users who are targets of subpoenas.

And EFF last week ​asked California’s and New York’s attorneys general to investigate Google​ for deceptive trade practices for breaking ​its promise​ to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement, citing the case of a doctoral student who was targeted with an ICE subpoena after briefly attending a pro-Palestine protest.

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The Left’s War on Comedy Is No Laughing Matter

If pure-hearted laughter is divine, the suppression of it is demonic. This could come to mind with our Left’s war on comedy, which really is happening. It also really is a campaign common to leftists.

Just ask USSR-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff, a man popular during the late Cold War period (the 1980s). As he quipped in an old Miller beer commercial, smiling, “In America, there’s plenty of lite beer and you can always find a party!”

“In Russia, the Party always finds you!”

He was joking, but not kidding. The Soviet Union practiced authoritarian censorship, and jokes had to be approved by a de facto “Department of Humor.” That was a colloquial name for a unit within the USSR’s Ministry of Culture. The latter’s job was to ensure the culture was communist.

And with socialism and communism gaining favor in the United States, so is their its penchant for suppressing good comedy. Writing about this Tuesday, commentator Armando Simon laments left-wing humorlessness. Citing Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, he writes that she

stated that one of the things that first helped her to break through the indoctrination received at school of the cult of personality of Fidel Castro was her observation that Castro never joked, highly unusual for a Cuban.

Simon then continues:

We are in the midst of a Marxist upheaval going full throttle towards turning America into a Communist utopia. The symptoms are all there: self-censorship, censorship (aka “cancel culture”), political indoctrination of the military, indoctrination in the schools, network news deliberately becoming propaganda outlets, Balkanizing the population, etc.

Another symptom is the slow strangulation of comics and comedy.

Comedians are complaining of the toxic air that is stifling comedy. “Cancel culture” is being waged by insufferable, self-righteous fanatics always lurking in the background, ready to pounce on the slightest transgression. Cancel culture has gone after comics because of the hypersensibility of the chronically offended — in other words, the leftists. It is a type of censorship. Some of the people who partake of the cancel culture also do so for the sheer exercise of power at ruining other people’s lives and livelihood, amazed that it is so easy to do nowadays. The range of punishment varies. Just ask Andrew Dice Clay and Dave Chapelle.

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UK Blocks Entry for Anti-Islam Politician

The Home Office’s decision to block Valentina Gomez from entering the UK ahead of a next month’s London rally has re-opened the debate over free speech and government overreach. Gomez, a US-based anti-Islam commentator, had planned to speak at the “Unite the Kingdom” march on 16 May. However, the Home Office has now revoked her electronic travel authorisation, saying her presence is “not conducive to the public good”. The ban followed pressure from Muslim organisations and political figures who pointed to her previous remarks on muslims and immigration.

Gomez is a 26-year-old Christian conservative originally from Colombia. Last week, her Electronic Travel Authorisation was approved, but the Home Office revoked her permit on April 20th. Reports suggest that officials acted after renewed scrutiny of remarks she made during a similar appearance in London in 2025, where she delivered “inflammatory” comments about Islam and immigration. It’s also reported that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood personally intervened to revoke the permission.

In its April 17 open letter, the Muslim Council of Britain urged the Home Secretary to revoke Valentina Gomez’s entry permission on the grounds that allowing her into the UK to speak at a Tommy Robinson rally showed “double standards” in how the government applies freedom of speech and entry rules. The MCB argued that Gomez’s past anti-Islam rhetoric risked making the UK’s streets “less safe”, and said others had previously been denied entry for inflammatory remarks aimed at different faith groups, making her case appear inconsistent by comparison. Its core case was therefore not only that Gomez was divisive, but that admitting her would signal uneven enforcement of the public-interest test used in immigration decisions.

The “Unite the Kingdom” marches have become a focal point for a growing anti-establishment constituency centred on immigration, Islam, public disorder and distrust of political institutions. The European Conservative reported that more than 100,000 people attended the September 2025 London march, presenting it as one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in recent years, though crowd figures at such events are often disputed.

The decision to exclude Gomez sits awkwardly with the UK’s self-image as a country committed to open political speech. It is one thing to prosecute criminal conduct or incitement; it is another to use border powers to decide which foreign political voices may be heard on contentious public questions. Once that principle is applied, the state is no longer merely keeping order. It is deciding, in advance, which arguments are too dangerous to enter the country. That is a serious threshold for a liberal democracy to cross.

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British universities paid security firm to ‘spy’ on pro-Palestine students

Twelve British universities paid a private firm run by former military intelligence officials to “spy” on student protesters and academics, including those who have expressed solidarity with Palestine, it can be revealed.

A joint investigation by Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates has uncovered evidence that Horus Security Consultancy Limited trawled through student social media feeds and conducted secret counter-terror threat assessments on behalf of some of Britain’s most elite institutions.

Horus, which describes itself as a “leading intelligence” firm, has been paid at least 440,000 pounds ($594,000) by universities since 2022.

Among those monitored were a Palestinian academic invited to give a guest lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University and a pro-Gaza PhD student at the London School of Economics, according to internal documents.

In October 2024, the University of Bristol provided the firm with a list of student protest groups it wished to receive alerts about, an internal university email suggests. It included pro-Palestinian and animal rights activists.

In total, 12 universities paid the firm to monitor campus protest activity. Others include the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University College London (UCL), King’s College London (KCL), the University of Sheffield, the University of Leicester, the University of Nottingham and Cardiff Metropolitan University.

There is no suggestion that this activity is illegal.

These findings have come to light after Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates submitted freedom of information (FOI) requests to more than 150 universities.

All the institutions named in this article were approached for comment by Al Jazeera and Liberty Investigates.

The University of Oxford, UCL, KCL, the University of Leicester and the University of Nottingham did not respond to requests for comment.

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Spanberger Rips Up Confederate Heritage To Separate Virginians From Their History

Seemingly not content to just destroy her state’s rule of law and election system, Democrat Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has declared war on Virginia’s heritage and, more specifically, those who dedicate themselves to preserving it.

The newly minted governor signed a bill on Monday that revoked tax exemptions from several Confederate heritage organizations, including the state’s divisions of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). Spanberger also recently signed a bill that ceases the production of specialty license plates bearing the likeness of Robert E. Lee.

“Governor Spanberger’s signing of this bill is a proud moment and an important step forward for Virginia,” state Delegate Alex Askew, who sponsored the bill and has campaigned for it for several years, stated. But the question is: A step forward toward what? A Virginia that hates its own history, that curses those men of the past who built the state and made it what it is today?

Spanberger’s signature represents, as The New York Times put it, part of “a yearslong Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s.”

And indeed it has been a years-long campaign by the left to erase Virginia’s, and America’s, history. The era that began with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and reached its fever pitch during the fiery George Floyd riots of summer 2020 saw the slow but sure disappearance of Confederate history from the public sphere. Even some Republican politicians found a convenient scapegoat in long-revered Southern symbols.

During a BLM riot in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2020, extremist agitators attacked the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy with “incendiary devices.” The building, deeded to the organization by the state in 1950, was filled with countless Civil War-era documents and artifacts. The resulting fire and destruction caused $4.1 million in damage to the building and its contents, according to a lawsuit filed by the UDC. The wanton vandalism that night also extended to the multiple Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue, including the famous equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed in 2021.

The UDC was founded by Southern women in 1894 to “honor their family members and ancestors who served in the Confederate military or contributed to the Southern war effort.” And because of this, Virginia’s Democrats seek to strike back for the sin of honoring their ancestors through charitable work. The new law is intended to cripple an organization that mostly dedicates itself these days to civic engagement of a decidedly nonpolitical sort — helping homeless shelters and food banks.

And, of course, the radical leftists didn’t stop at Confederate monuments. Statues and memorials to the Founding Fathers, Christopher Columbus, and Teddy Roosevelt all came under attack during the heyday of race wokeness. Many of the memorials and museums that escaped physical attack were otherwise “contextualized” into oblivion with asides and nitpicks that drilled into patrons’ heads that America’s ancestors were very bad people.

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FTC Settlement: Ad Agencies Agree to Stop “Brand Safety” Collusion to Defund Media Outlets

Three of the world’s biggest advertising conglomerates have agreed to stop colluding to defund media outlets whose politics they didn’t like.

The Federal Trade Commission and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by seven other states, filed a complaint and simultaneous settlement against Dentsu US, GroupM Worldwide (WPP’s media-buying arm), and Publicis on April 15, accusing them of running what amounts to a coordinated censorship operation through the advertising supply chain.

Starting in 2018, these agencies, which collectively control over $81 billion in ad-buying power, agreed to adopt identical “brand safety” standards that treated so-called “misinformation” as a category of content too dangerous for any advertiser to touch.

They did this through two industry groups: the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau, and the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media, better known as GARM. The result was a shared “Brand Safety Floor” that could starve publishers of revenue without any single company having to take public responsibility for the decision.

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Big Advertisers Settle Case with FTC over Leftist Censorship in Advertising and Suspected Collusion Against Breitbart, Other Conservatives

Three of the world’s largest advertising companies settled Wednesday with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over claims that they colluded on policies to combat alleged misinformation that denied advertising revenue to conservative publishers such as Breitbart News.

The FTC said in a complaint filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that WPP, Dentsu, and Publicis coordinated on policies that limited the number of ads that ran on sites with content that the industry had identified as misinformation. The policy resulted in fewer ads running on media outlets such as Breitbart News, punishing outlets that ran content that was “lawful but disfavored.” The filing explained that these advertisers sought to impose common “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry. The FTC stated that the ad agencies, with their primary competitors, Omnicom and IPG, operated through their trade associations to establish a “Brand Safety Floor” to combat “misinformation.”

“The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a written statement. “The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.”

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” the FTC chairman said.

Ferguson continued:

This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.

A spokesman for WPP said in a statement that the agreement “reflects our existing and ongoing commitment to provide our clients with unbiased advice as they decide where to place their media.” A spokesman for Dentsu said the company was “fully committed to operating transparently, with integrity, and in strict compliance with all applicable laws.” Publicis had not responded to a request for comment from the New York Times.

The FTC said in its filing that the ad agencies “coordinated” through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an entity created by the World Federation of Advertisers, of which the three advertisers are members.

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Explosive Report: As Dobbs Majority Faced Death Threats, Liberal Justices Slow-Walked Release

When the draft of the Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. Wade leaked to the press, the conservative justices who signed on to the majority opinion suddenly wore bigger targets on their backs. The very real threat of assassination hung over them like a coming thunderstorm. 

And still their pro-abortion colleagues stalled the release of the official ruling for weeks, putting the justices’ lives at increased risk, as detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s new book on Justice Samuel Alito and reported Saturday by Fox News.

Alito is the justice who wrote Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling ending nationalized abortion.

“Alito asked the dissenters to make the completion of their dissents their priority because delay of the decision was a security threat,” Hemingway, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief writes in Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution.“Abortion supporters had an incentive to kill one or more of the justices in the majority to change the outcome.” 

The dissenters — Justices Stephen Breyer (counting down the days until his retirement at the end of the 2021-22 term ), Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — “demurred,” Hemingway reports. Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the liberals when they expected to be wrapped up. They refused to provide a date. 

The tension and the threats escalated. 

‘Serious Security Risk’

On May 2, 2022, accomplice media outlet Politico published the 98-page draft of Dobbs. The unprecedented leak set off a wave of leftist protests and a literal firestorm of pro-abortion-led violence. Six days later — on Mother’s Day — a radical who was eventually arrested thanks to a half-eaten burrito firebombed the Madison headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, a Christian pro-life, pro-family organization. 

“In the ensuing weeks, hundreds of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations would be vandalized, some even set ablaze,” Hemingway wrote. Protesters also lined the streets and sidewalks outside the conservative justices’ homes.

More than a month after the leak, Nicholas Roske, 26 at the time, arrived at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with murder on his mind. In his possession were a Glock pistol, ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, duct tape, and more accoutrements, according to the criminal complaint. Roske said he was going to stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned by getting rid of a judge — or three — that voted to stop the deeply flawed 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide. 

“Everyone knew that the leak posed a serious security risk for justices. Since decisions do not take effect until issued officially from the bench, the death of a justice before then could alter the result. The threat of assassination increased dramatically,” Hemingway writes. 

It took 53 days to finally release the Dobbs decision. Despite the growing threat to their colleagues, the liberals on the court refused to listen to urgent pleas to complete their work, Hemingway reports.

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Letitia James’ Crusade Against Abortion Pill Reversal Is Also Killing Free Speech

State attorneys general are duty-bound to seek justice for the weak and powerless, not to use their immense power to harass them. But New York Attorney General Letitia James’ policing of private conversations about the abortion pill reversal (APR) protocol amounts to a cynical abuse of state power.

Two years ago, James launched a legal assault on Heartbeat International and 11 affiliated pregnancy centers in New York. She claimed the centers and Heartbeat — the largest network of pregnancy help organizations in the world — had engaged in false advertising, supposedly deceiving women by sharing scientific findings supporting the safety and effectiveness of APR.

APR is a safe and effective way for a woman to improve her odds of continuing her pregnancy to term after she has ingested mifepristone — the first pill in an abortion drug regimen designed to block progesterone from the growing baby. A worldwide network of more than 1,500 health care professionals is available to prescribe bioidentical progesterone to counteract the mifepristone in order to reverse its effects. Most notably, statistics suggest that more than 8,000 babies have been saved through the abortion pill reversal protocol.

Thousands of smiling — living — babies and emotional testimonies of grateful moms illustrate the success of a chosen medical treatment. And James “has no business butting into the intimate medical decision of [a] … mother.” It’s why Heartbeat and its New York affiliates filed their own lawsuit, arguing that defendant James has provided “no evidence of fraud, misrepresentation, material omission, or harm to anyone” in providing free services or speaking about the safety and efficacy of APR.

This week, Heartbeat and its affiliates have their day in court. On Wednesday, April 15, their attorneys argued that James’ hostile lawsuit should be dismissed because it targets free speech and participation in public debate. James’ lawsuit is a classic Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP). Or, more bluntly, James’ efforts amount to a bully’s legal slap in the face to keep small pro-life nonprofits from sharing a life-saving message she doesn’t like.

Her friends have called her a “voice for the voiceless.” She claims to “speak truth to power, and challenge the status quo.” And she frequently talks of “using [her] position to address the needs of those who are locked out of the sunshine of opportunity.”

But the attorney general ought not ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent defense of free speech rights, even when offering medical services. At the end of March, the court delivered an 8-1 decision in Chiles v. Salazar, noting that counseling conversations are speech and Colorado cannot silence viewpoints in the counseling room. The majority warned that “[t]oday, tomorrow, and forever, too, any professional speech that deviates from ‘current beliefs about the safety and efficacy of various medical treatments’ could be silenced with relative ease.”

Sensitive to the danger of stifling innovation in medicine, they continued, “Medical consensus, too, is not static; it evolves and always has. A prevailing standard of care may reflect what most practitioners believe today, but it cannot mark the outer boundary of what they may say tomorrow.”

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