One year ago, I joined the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several other co-plaintiffs to file a suit in federal court challenging what journalist Michael Shellenberger has called the censorship-industrial complex. While much of the press cooperated with the state's censorship efforts and has ignored our court battle, we expect that it will ultimately go to the Supreme Court, setting up Missouri v. Biden to be the most important free speech case of our generation"and arguably, of the past 50 years. Prior government censorship cases typically involved a state actor unconstitutionally meddling with one publisher, one author, one or two books, a single article. But as we intend to prove in court, the federal government has censored hundreds of thousands of Americans, violating the law on tens of millions of occasions in the last several years. This unprecedented breach was made possible by the wholly novel reach and breadth of the new digital social media landscape.
It wasn't long ago that Toyota's hybrid vehicles were all the rage with the climate-change left. Now progressive investors and government pension funds are targeting the Prius manufacturer in a proxy campaign because it has questioned the climate lobby's electric-vehicle orthodoxy. Toyota discloses its CO2 emissions and has pledged to make all its vehicles carbon neutral by 2050. This should please the climate crowd. Yet progressive investors are seeking to oust Chairman Akio Toyoda and are pushing a resolution at its June 14 shareholder meeting to make the world's largest auto maker disclose its climate-related lobbying.
It sounds like the ultimate Monty Python scene: A bunch of humorless functionaries review a hilarious script to remove every line that might offend someone. The result is a virtual haiku of disconnected observations without a punchline. That would make for a funny premise if it were not actually happening to comedy legend John Cleese. With a much-anticipated stage remake of the film classic, Life of Brian, Cleese said he found himself under siege by several actors to drop offensive material from the movie
A whistleblower from inside the Internal Revenue Service has spoken publicly for the first time about a highly sensitive political probe he has supervised, which CBS News has determined is the ongoing probe into the finances of President Biden's son Hunter Biden. He said he became so concerned about prosecutors' handling of "a high profile, controversial" investigation that he felt duty-bound to sound alarms.
A popular tactic of American politics, especially on the left, is to attack the character of those with whom you don't agree. This was evident with the recent show "Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court," which PBS aired on May 9. A PBS producer emailed me last January about a planned documentary on the life and legacy of Justice Thomas, who used to work for me. The producer wrote that she wanted "to speak to those closest to him to present a nuanced portrait," and she would "therefore like to request an interview. I agreed to an interview that lasted an hour and a half. That was my mistake. The resulting show was far from nuanced, and it wasn't really a documentary. It was a two-hour hit job on the character of Clarence Thomas.
Border enforcement, sensible energy policy, a modicum of control over the regulatory leviathan, an anti foreign intervention policy ... .these are big federal issues that don't even touch on cultural issues where the GOP mostly is far better than Dems.