CPAC SUNDAY: Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue Declares Trump the “Legitimate and Still Actual President”

 

Robert Unanue, the CEO of Goya Foods, spoke today at the CPAC Convention at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando.

During his speech the Goya Foods CEO called out the fraud in the 2020 election and declared Trump president!

Unanae told the cheering pro-Trump CPAC crowd that Donald Trump is not only his president still, but also the “legitimate” president of the United States.

Via Raw Story:

Robert Unanue: “My biggest honor today is going to be that, I think, we’re going to be on the same stage as, in my opinion, the real, the legitimate, and the still actual president of the United States, Donald J. Trump… I received, I think as many people I know and maybe many of you, unsolicited ballots. So, I mean, as a citizen of the United States, I think I’m allowed to vote once. once — not twice.”

 

CPAC SUNDAY: Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue Declares Trump the "Legitimate and Still Actual President" (VIDEO) (thegatewaypundit.com)

Missouri Judge Sends 14-Year-Old Girl to Live With Allegedly Abusive Dad While Jailing Her Mom

A family court judge, Nicole Zellweger, has launched an all-out judicial assault on Angela Freiner and her minor daughter who are refusing her order to make the 14-year-old girl return to the man who she says sexually molested her. The minor at the center of the controversy recorded a hearing on her smartphone that got into the hands of investigative journalist Michael Volpe who posted it on YouTube. In the video, the minor child begs the judge not to send her to live with the man she says is a child molester.

The audio is hard to hear but it’s very plain that the minor child is in distress and begging the adults around her to take her concerns seriously. In return, Zellweger tried to coerce the daughter to comply, threatening to jail her mother for contempt. In the recording above, Zellweger can be heard telling the minor child that Freiner’s freedom is at stake if the child doesn’t cooperate. “She has free will but her free will can end up putting her in jail,” Zellweger says.

The child, in obvious distress, pleaded with Zellweger, “I don’t want to live with him.”

The judge replied, “When your mom is taken to jail you will have no other parent to live with but dad…I understand you’re not happy with the court’s judgment.”

When the child refused to consent, the judge continued to threaten her with arresting her mother. “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” Zellweger said.

“I still don’t understand,” said the minor. “I told you that he was touching me [unintelligible] and you’re still going to make me go with him?”

“There’s no evidence…” Zellweger interrupted the minor’s plea.

Texas Family Courts Under Fire From Angry Parents: ‘Our Confidence in the Judiciary Is at an All-Time Low’

“This is what I’m telling you,” continued the child while sobbing. “I have a personal experience,” she said, begging. “You don’t understand, you’re just going to force me to go with a child molester.”

At that point a male voice jumped in and scolded the child to be quiet with a loud “No!” and the minor fell silent while the judge repeated to the young girl that her story doesn’t matter in the eyes of the court because Zellweger didn’t hear any evidence of the molestation. But if only the child and the abuser were there at the time of the molestation, what evidence would there be, other than the child’s word?

The child reported the alleged abuse to her school counselor and Child Protective Services in Montana (where she lived with her father) filed a report, but her allegations fell on deaf ears. When the child went to visit her mother for Christmas, she disclosed the allegation and refused to go back. Zellweger still ruled to send her to live with the father full-time in spite of the allegations of abuse the child made in Montana and in her own courtroom. In the age of #MeToo and #BelieveWomen, why are girls ignored and silenced and sent back to alleged abusers in Zellweger’s courtroom?

Court documents reveal that the minor was candid in court.

As planned, the GAL [guardian ad-litem] conducted examination of the Child in camera. The Child expressed her wishes to remain with Petitioner during the school year. The Child expressed her view that Respondent does not listen to her feelings and makes her feel insecure at times. She further testified that she feels manipulated at times by Respondent. She testified that she is more “comfortable” with Petitioner.

The documents also reveal that the father has a criminal record and is on probation for domestic abuse.

Petitioner and the GAL asked questions of Respondent about his past/current criminal convictions. Respondent testified that he is on probation until July of 2021 for disorderly conduct related to a domestic/family dispute that involved his wife and his step-daughter…Respondent testified that he has a temper and that there have been arguments at his house, although he testified that things have improved and he is working … on this issue. These facts trouble the Court greatly, but the Court finds Respondent credible in his testimony that he is working on his anger issues.

Most normal family arguments don’t end in arrests and convictions. But despite the testimony that the father has anger issues that led to arrest and conviction, Zellweger ordered the minor into the custody of her father over the custody of her mother who failed a marijuana test. The judge sided with a convicted abuser over a mom who smokes pot and let her daughter have a nose piercing. This brings into question why states are legalizing marijuana all over the country without changing the way judges treat pot-smoking parents.

There was additional evidence about Petitioner’s lifestyle that the Child witnessed, but which was entirely inappropriate for the Child to have witnessed, including Petitioner smoking marijuana at the home.

The judge did not enter into the record what the “additional evidence” there was that the mother was unfit other than an allegation that she left the minor with a family friend when she went out of state and got stranded and was unable to return quickly. Freiner denied that her daughter was in any danger during that time. Court documents also reveal that the father took the minor child to the home of his father, a level-three sex offender who had been convicted of “rape/fear, force, and sexual battery” according to the registry and stayed several nights at his house.

Additionally, Respondent testified that he took the Child to Arkansas to visit his parents. At that time, the GAL raised a concern about the Child spending nights at Respondent’s father’s house and Respondent told the GAL that he was staying at a hotel. However, Respondent acknowledged during testimony that he only stayed in a hotel one night and spent the rest of the nights at his parents’ house, which was in complete disregard of the GAL’s communications with Respondent. Such flagrant disregard for the GAL’s position (that the Child not spend an overnight at paternal grandfather’s house) concerns the GAL and this Court.

In many cases, child abuse complaints are treated as hearsay even though the victim is begging for help. Children are not believed. PJ Media confirmed multiple cases in St. Louis County that were reported to the police and were dropped by the county prosecutor, Wesley Bell, a controversial figure who supports defunding the police and has been publicly accused of creating a hostile working environment for white women and refusing to prosecute fathers who owe back payments of child support.

Sources who were in the courtroom on Friday told PJ Media that in response to the child’s heartfelt pleas to stay with her mother, Zellweger made good on her threat to arrest Freiner. She was held in criminal contempt and jailed for two days. Then sources told PJ Media Zellweger called the county juvenile detention and had the child committed to the behavioral center at the Children’s Hospital of St. Louis in retaliation for the refusal to obey. Upon her arrival at the hospital, sources say the child immediately informed the doctors that she experienced sexual abuse. As doctors are mandated reporters, that disclosure should have triggered a hotline call to the St. Louis County abuse hotline. If the doctors did their job, Zellweger now has two reports on her desk saying that the man she has ordered to have physical custody of the minor should be investigated for child sexual abuse.

When the secret court recording was posted to YouTube, Zellweger issued a sweeping rebuke of the mother and convened an emergency hearing on Friday to order the mother to remove all postings from the internet. She is gagging everyone involved from talking about what she is doing inside her courtroom. She is also threatening the mother with six months in jail if she does not have members of the media delete the above video from the internet.

This is an impossible order. Freiner does not have control over members of the media who are doing their jobs and reporting court corruption and judicial overreach to the public. Zellweger herself is responsible for the seeming judicial overreach in this case that alerted the press to her actions. The fact that Zellweger thinks she has the power to tell the media what to report should concern the public. She does not have the power to control what the media prints, but she sure thinks she does. In the order, Zellweger wrote:

The Court also intends to enter an Order requiring that the parties/counsels remove any and all recordings previously posted on the internet, obtain all recordings disseminated to third parties, and turn over to the Court all originals and copies of all Court proceedings that were recorded by the parties or in the possession of the parties…no later than March 3, 2021.

If Freiner does not obey this order, the judge is threatening to put her in jail for up to six months per contempt charge and, based on her previous decision to jail Freiner for two days, it seems likely she will do it unless some higher authority stops her. The court is not only silencing Freiner but also attempting to silence a minor child who is desperate for anyone to believe her that she is not safe where the court has placed her.

Zellweger’s excuse for not wanting the public to know what is going on inside her fiefdom at the St. Louis County circuit court is that the case is a “paternity case.” This is news to people connected to the proceedings who say previously the case was a custody case until the YouTube video of Zellweger threatening Freiner and her child was posted online. In fact, court records refer to this case as a “custody case” up until the gag order, when records switched to calling it a “paternity case.” Did Zellweger change the type of case in front of her to trigger secrecy so the press cannot investigate her behavior on the bench?

Previous to the February 11 hearing, Freiner had been posting many videos of court hearings on her Facebook page. The judge had never commented about these videos, not even when Freiner posted one showing the guardian ad litem (GAL), Venus Jackson, admitting to Zellweger that the minor child reported that she was scared of her father and did not want to live with him because of the alleged abuse. That video is now unavailable to the public because Freiner removed it to comply with the judge’s orders. However, PJ Media reviewed the recording before it was deleted and can confirm that Jackson informed the judge of the child’s concerns. Zellweger is actively engaged in hiding the child’s pleas for help from the public by issuing the gag order.

Many questions need to be answered:

1. Does a child have a right to due process and proper legal representation in a court of law? If so, the GAL should be removed and the child should have an attorney who represents her interests and her interests alone. If she were an LGBT minor who wanted a sex change, she would have the ACLU fighting for her. Instead, she is stuck with a GAL who is not only ignoring her but is on record in a separate video bragging that many of her clients complain about her but she isn’t concerned about getting sued because her clients are too poor to do it. “The clients on my GAL cases don’t have money. My clients complain all the time, but most of them don’t have money for [unintelligible] anything” she said in a secret Zoom meeting. Her comments come at the 38:54 mark here. Is Venus Jackson an appropriate advocate for the minor child after that admission?
2. Does the court have the power and the right to order a parent to remove something from the internet?
3. Does anyone have the power or capability to remove content from social media and news platforms in different states or across the world?
4. Is it reasonable to order a litigant to do so knowing it is impossible?
5. Are examples of making humanly impossible demands upon litigants a pathway to giving custody to abusers and offenders under the guise of a) failure to comply with court orders, b) for uncooperative conduct and c) for refusals to reunify a child with a parent with allegations of abuse or neglect?
6. Does the higher level of confidentiality create a license for the GALs and the courts to act in a manner inconsistent with conduct that they might exhibit if there were cameras and press in the room?

PJ Media reached out to Zellweger’s office and the county spokesperson with these exact questions. Neither responded. Investigative journalist Michael Volpe attempted to question Jackson about her secret Zoom activities here.

Volpe is compiling statements of parents who have the same experience that Freiner has had in St. Louis County. Many parents claim judges ignored children who claimed they are being sexually molested and remanded them to the custody of their alleged abusers. The stories of parents reporting the same patterns in St. Louis County Circuit Court are piling up. Here is one of many such stories on Volpe’s YouTube channel below. Judge Zellweger’s actions to attempt to stop the media from reporting what’s going on in the St. Louis County Circuit Court have only made journalists more interested in this case. What is Judge Zellweger trying to hide?

Missouri Judge Puts a Girl With Allegedly Abusive Dad – PJ Media

Live: Trump delivers remarks at CPAC 2021

 

Sidney Powell Drops a BOMB on Sunday Morning Futures: CIA May have Used Dominion for Its Own Benefit – Gina Haspel Should be Fired Immediately!

Release the Kraken!

Sidney Powell Drops a BOMB on Sunday Morning Futures: CIA May have Used Dominion for Its Own Benefit - Gina Haspel Should be Fired Immediately! (Video) (thegatewaypundit.com)

Trump Attorney Sidney Powell went on with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures this morning.

During her interview Powell called for CIA Director Gina Haspel to be FIRED IMMEDIATELY.
Powell said Haspel and the CIA must have known the Dominion voting systems had serious flaws.
But Haspel and the CIA did nothing.

Sidney Powell: It’s really an insidious, corrupt system and I can’t tell you how livid I am at our government for not paying attention to complaints, even brought by Democrats… No one in our government has paid any attention to it which makes me wonder if the CIA has used it for its own benefit in different places. And why Gina Haspel is still there in the CIA is beyond my comprehension. She should be fired immediately.

Sidney Powell was ON FIRE this morning.

It’s going to be an explosive few weeks ahead!

Woman beaten by violent ANTIFA leftist as police driven out by mob

PORTLAND, OR – Violent leftist protests in Portland continued as one bystander was beaten and the incident was caught on video.   Police in Portland said Saturday night’s mob became violent and destructive.

“A march in the Pearl District Neighborhood has become destructive, with some windows broken and graffiti applied to buildings,” the Portland Police posted on Facebook asking the rioters to please stop. “To those marching in the Pearl District: Officers have observed and community members have reported members of this group have damaged buildings in the Pearl District. Immediately stop participating in criminal behavior including damaging property.”

Police were eventually driven away by the mob.

Woman beaten by violent ANTIFA leftist as police driven out by mob | Police Blotter | Shore News Network

Easy Homemade Gnocchi

 

Ingredients you'll need:

Gnocchi - 3 large (2 lbs) rustic potatoes Water 1 large egg Salt 1.5 -2 cups (225-300 g) All-purpose flour Pesto - 1/3 cup (55 g) pine nuts 2 cups basil 3 cloves garlic 1 cup (90 g) grated parmigiano reggiano Salt Pepper Splash of water 1/2 cup (120 ml) extra virgin olive oil Mornay - 1.5 Tbsp (28 g) unsalted butter 1.5 Tbsp (17 g) all-purpose flour 1 cup (240 ml) whole milk 1.5 cup (35 g) grated gruyere cheese 1/4 cup (21 g) grated parmigiano reggiano Salt Pepper Grated nutmeg Sage Butter - 3.5 Tbsp (50 g) unsalted butter 1/2 bunch fresh sage Salt

SCOTUS Deep Dive: What’s Really Going On With John Roberts?

What's really happening with Chief Justice Roberts? Is he sinister, or cowardly?

 

 

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John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, has lost his mojo. If this were baseball, we’d say he’s in a slump. If it were football, we’d wonder if he was nursing an injury through a long and grueling season. Since it’s politics—I know, SCOTUS is ‘above’ politics—and there isn’t an age-out requirement (see Exhibit A: Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters), we have to speculate about what changed this once outspoken jurist.

Given Chief Justice Roberts’ reliable position quarterbacking monumental cases, why is he shrinking in front of our eyes?

Breitbart News reported this week that SCOTUS sided with two California churches in a 6 – 3 decision to overturn a Covid-19 restriction. Roberts sided with the majority in this case but offered chilling words worthy of further investigation. His written opinion included the statement that “federal courts owe significant deference to politically accountable officials with the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health.”

On its face, this seems to be nothing more than a textualist deferring to state elected officials. Yet, Roberts has shown a penchant for flair in his rulings. Early in his tenure on the Supreme Court, he seemed to be the conservative jurist George W. Bush believed him to be. Roberts has crossed Party lines on numerous occasions, though, causing some to question if he’s conservative or liberal. In January 2021, Heavy offered a delicate piece (oxymoronic, if you ask me) trying to set the record straight about the Chief Justice’s political leaning. The only takeaway from their investigation is that Roberts sees himself as an objective umpire.

My eyebrow raised when I read that narrative. In his written responses during his 2003 confirmation to the federal appeals court, Roberts claimed he doesn’t follow a singular interpretation of the Constitution. Instead, he applies a contextual interpretation based on each case’s merits and how the Constitution’s provisions allow for interpretation in that case.

We are left with a Chief Jurist in our country choosing to defer on legal questions of varying complexity based on a belief that the Constitution allows him to punt cases of which he wants no part. Generally, SCOTUS does steer clear of cases that are either already covered by legal precedent or ask the Court to intervene on a question where they have no standing. That is not what we see from Roberts lately. Let’s review the last six months of his ‘decisions:’

• October 2020: Roberts sided with liberal judges in the majority opinion to permit PA to count non-postmarked ballots three days after the election.
• November 2020: Roberts sided with liberal judges in a dissenting opinion that NY can restrict worship in churches.
• December 2020: After the Court asked the Defendants to prepare opposition briefs in the Texas case against the November election, SCOTUS rejected the claim for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.
• January 2021: Roberts recused himself of the second impeachment trial for President Trump on the basis that since Trump was no longer POTUS, the Chief Justice could not preside.
• February 2021: Roberts sided with the majority opinion in the California churches case while offering dubious ‘deference’ for state officials a mere three months after siding with the states on a similar case.

Aside from the Texas case, where no jurist offered public dissent, Roberts has taken contradictory positions—even against his previous positions—that show a Supreme Court Justice decidedly playing politics.

How can we believe Chief Justice Roberts wants to be the ‘umpire’ when he intervenes in the Pennsylvania case less than one month before the election?

How can we believe Chief Justice Roberts when he says in November that a state can keep churches closed while saying in February they cannot?

How can we believe Chief Justice Roberts acts as the Court facilitator when he refuses to preside over the second impeachment hearing on a technicality?

We’ve seen strange behavior from John Roberts over the last six months. It’s been counterintuitive to the jurist he claimed to be when appointed to the federal appeals court and later the Supreme Court. Of course, jurists can—and do—evolve over a lengthy time on the bench. I can’t help but wonder if Roberts has evolved into someone who doesn’t want to tackle the significant cases because he’s more concerned about his public image. He’s flipped more times than a Belgian waffle. We can only speculate as to why.

As always, this has been the World According to Chris.

SCOTUS Deep Dive: What's Really Going On With John Roberts? - WayneDupree.com

Where Are All the Retractions of the Brian Sicknick Story?

The Capitol Police officer did not die after being attacked by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher on January 6. Yet news organizations and lawmakers refuse to correct the Big Lie.

Law enforcement officials, according to several news reports, now are searching for someone who allegedly released bear spray into a crowd of police officers January 6 outside the Capitol building. The suspect might have sprayed the chemical at Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died January 7 reportedly from injuries sustained in the chaos. 

“In a significant breakthrough in the case, investigators have now pinpointed a person seen on video of the riot who attacked several officers with bear spray, including Officer Sicknick,” the New York Times reported Friday night.

With that one sentence, the Times buried for good its own original account of what happened to Sicknick—the now-debunked claim Trump “loyalists” beat him to death with a fire extinguisher. The Times seeded the fabricated story in a January 8 article; the paper “updated” the article—in reality, a retraction—on February 12 after pressure from a few outlets, including American Greatness.

The “bear spray” assault is just the latest change in the slowly unraveling mystery surrounding Sicknick’s untimely death. (He was 42.) His grieving mother told the Daily Maillast week she believes her son died of a stroke and isn’t sure if any sort of repellent spray caused it. The D.C. Medical Examiner’s office, in what can only be interpreted as a cover-up, refuses to release any autopsy or toxicology report, even though Sicknick was cremated weeks ago.

The public, and his family, may never know exactly how he died.

But one thing is certain: Brian Sicknick did not die after being attacked by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher on January 6. The story is a lie. It is in fact, unlike claims of election fraud, a Big Lie. And everyone from Joe Biden to top news organizations down to random Twitter accounts who repeated the lie knew it was a lie because no evidence ever existed to prove the claim was true. It didn’t matter to the propagandists of the lie that it was a lie; the fabrication served its destructive political purposes. 

Yet major news organizations and lawmakers still refuse to correct the Big Lie. The death-by-fire-extinguisher fable is a permanent feature in the egregiously overblown drama of the January 6 “insurrection.” The uncorrected version will be part of the historical record.

A January 8 article in the Wall Street Journal still states, “Brian D. Sicknick . . . was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during Wednesday’s unrest, according to a law-enforcement official.”

The Washington Post, the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” vanguards of the truth, has not corrected an editorial paying tribute to the fallen officer. “Officer Sicknick was pummeled by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher, according to witnesses,” the editorial board wrote January 11.

“Sicknick was placed on life support in hospital after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher wielded by a protester at the Capitol on Wednesday, according to a tweet by reporter Alexandra Limon,” Newsweek reported January 8. Neither the article nor the linked tweet has been corrected as of Saturday.

The Associated Press on January 2 reported: “During the Capitol siege, as rioters seething over President Donald Trump’s election loss stormed the building, Sicknick was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher. He died the next day.” AP has yet to publish a correction or an “update.”

An article in the New York Daily News still includes a passage in a January 29 story claiming “the police officer who was pepper-sprayed then fatally bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher when hundreds of Donald Trump supporters stormed Congress on Jan. 6 will lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol rotunda.”

You get the idea. Thousands of articles, broadcast segments, and cable news diatribes perpetuate the lie about Sicknick’s death spawning millions more iterations with no updated facts. Scores of verified Twitter users still have posts online promoting the lie to their followers. 

“Officer Sicknick has been muzzled for life because the mob you incited murdered him with a fire extinguisher. You are not getting out of this with a political career you pathetic seditionist,” Fred Wellman, executive director of the Lincoln Project, tweeted at Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on January 24.

“Love how all these stories make clear: This is not the murderer who murdered Brian Sicknick. It’s another (wannabe) murderer,” Salon’s Joan Walsh tweeted January 14 about the arrest of another man charged with throwing a fire extinguisher at police. 

“The extinguisher that Mr. Sanford allegedly threw is separate from the one that killed Officer Brian Sicknick, who was also struck in the head with a fire extinguisher during the unrest and died from his wounds,” Harvard epidemiologist and COVID-19 panic pusher Eric Feigel-Ding tweeted to his nearly 500,000 followers on January 14.

Will Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who launched an aggressive campaign to censor and deplatform users spreading “disinformation” about the 2020 election, take similar steps to ban any content related to the fire extinguisher lie? Let’s not hold our breath.

Of course, the biggest platform to spread the Big Lie about Brian Sicknick’s death was the House Democrats’ impeachment trial. The claim is forever part of the government charging documents attempting to bolster the case against President Donald Trump. Will Republicans now demand the lie be stricken from the official record? Let’s not hold our breath about that, either.

The sad reality is even if every news outlet, journalist, editor, pundit, lawmakers, and social media user admitted the story was false, millions of Americans will refuse to believe the truth. Blinded by hatred for Trump and his supporters, willfully brainwashed by their favorite cable news host or Washington Post columnist, these folks once again will reject facts just as they’ve done over and over in the Trump era.

And the news media know they can get away with it. No one gets fired, no one apologizes, no one faces public humiliation. There is no reckoning, which is why they will do it again. If anyone thinks exploiting the untimely death of a police officer to score political points is the low point for the media, Democrats, and NeverTrump Republicans, stand by. They seem to find new lows by the day.

Where Are All the Retractions of the Brian Sicknick Story? (amgreatness.com)

The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business

Amazon’s decision to remove Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally isn't about a P.C. company removing one book—it is a challenge to the fundamental principles underlying American democracy.

Just a week ago, I received an email from Ryan Anderson, who was recently tapped to lead the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and who wrote When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment for me at Encounter Books back in 2018. A reader who had tried to order his book from Amazon reported he was unable to find the book listed on the site. I looked myself and, yes, that reader was correct. Other books by Anderson are listed, as are various books on the “transgender” phenomenon, including a now out-of-print title that purports to rebut When Harry Became Sally. But the book itself is nowhere to be found. 

How odd. The book was controversial when it was first published—the New York Timesdevoted not one but two columns to abusing it. But it sold well and, outside the precincts of wokedom, it was regarded as what it is: a thoughtful, compassionate, and well-researched discussion of the devastating psychological costs of embracing the latest fad of sexual exoticism. 

What happened? Was it an accident? A little digging showed that, like the Earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” It was not just that a book that had been listed and sold by Amazon for the last three years was “out of stock” or “unavailable.” It had disappeared without a trace, more or less like Nikolai Yezhov standing next to Josef Stalin in that notorious photo by the Moscow Canal. One day he is seen smiling next to the great leader. The next day he is gone, airbrushed from history.

RIA-Novosti Moscow/AFP via Getty Images

So it was with When Harry Became Sally. Amazon had pushed it into the oubliette; the book was gone, “canceled” by the wardens of wokeness at Amazon. Further inquiries show that it was also gone from the Kindle store and from Audible, the audiobooks emporium that is owned by Amazon. As of this writing, the book is still available at Barnes and Noble and other emporia, including at the Encounter Books website.

We’ve heard a lot about “cancel culture” recently. Here was the latest example. The delisting, without any sort of warning, notice, or explanation of a serious, well-regarded book because . . . because, why? After multiple inquiries, we were informed that the book was removed because it violated Amazon’s new “content guidelines” against “offensive” material or “hate speech.”

Not for the first time, I was reminded that the wokerati of Big Tech and Big Media have become drunk with power and, emboldened by the Democratic sweep of the levers of power, have begun to regard Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a how-to manual instead of what it is, a scarifying warning about the dangers of totalitarianism.

Amazon, which presides over more than 80 percent of the book sales in the United States, decides to erase a book, ostensibly because it violates a nebulous policy regarding offensive content but really because it violates today’s standard of political correctness. After all, Amazon has no problem selling Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the lunatic, anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan. 

I very much doubt that whoever made the decision to remove When Harry Became Sally from Amazon is a secret admirer of the book, but I did wonder. The immediate effect of the ban was to spark a run on the book. We instantly sold out of the 2,000 copies we had in stock and, as of this writing, we have orders for some 3,000 more. 

If Amazon hoped to bury the book, they made a big mistake. Ryan Anderson has been ubiquitous on prominent news and opinion shows discussing the ban. And on Wednesday, Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) sent a blistering letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding an explanation for his company’s sudden termination of the book. 

“In its decision to remove Mr. Anderson’s book from its platforms,” the senators write, “Amazon has openly signaled to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms.” How’s that for understatement? They go on to point out the obvious: “Amazon’s shortsighted censorship of this well-researched and thoughtful contribution to modern American discourse is not just a decision made in poor taste, but an assault on free speech that carries weighty implications for the future of open discourse in the digital age.”

We at Encounter will make sure that Ryan Anderson’s book, which is an important contribution to a matter of exigent public debate, remains available. But in its brazenness, Amazon has signaled a new escalation in Left’s war against free speech. I know it will not stop with the attempted erase of a single book that, partly because of the force of its argument, is cordially hated by the Left. On the contrary, Amazon’s behavior is part of a growing current of intolerance, conducted, ironically, under the banner of “diversity.” 

At times, it seems surreal. February is Black History Month, but Amazon nevertheless decided to cancel Michael Pack’s award-winning documentary about Justice Clarence Thomas because Thomas, although black, is apparently not the right sort of black. 

I will have more to say about this new totalitarian movement of intolerance in due course. It goes far beyond the attempted canceling of a book that fails to pass muster with the custodians of correctitude. Indeed, it amounts to an existential challenge to the fundamental principles that underlie American democracy. For now, though, I will end with another observation from George Orwell. “If liberty means anything at all,” he wrote, “it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear.”

The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business (amgreatness.com)

Trump To Form A Super Pac To Help ‘America First’ Republicans

Many have been wondering whether Donald Trump is going to campaign to be the President of the United States again in 2024, and his next move just gave a major clue.

On Thursday, at a meeting with his top political advisors, he announced that he plans to form a new Super PAC designed to promote his America First agenda and promote candidates who support it, Politico reported.

Former President Donald Trump told political advisers Thursday that he’s chosen longtime ally Corey Lewandowski to run a yet-to-be-formed super PAC as part of his expanding post-presidential political apparatus, according to multiple people familiar with the discussion.

The decision was made in a multi-hour meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday. Trump gathered his top political lieutenants, including Donald Trump Jr., former campaign manager Bill Stepien, former deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, former campaign manager Brad Parscale, former White House social media director Dan Scavino and senior adviser Jason Miller. Alex Cannon, an attorney who has been advising the Trump team on the post-White House plans, was also present.

Lewandowski, himself a former campaign manager for Trump in 2016, did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the former president will announce more details about his political operation “in the coming weeks.”

And while the decision to form the group could be a boon for Republicans in 2022, 2024 and beyond, it could also mean that Trump has his own 2024 plans.

“MAGA supporters and candidates supporting President Trump’s America First agenda are going to be impressed with the political operation being built out here,” his spokesman said. “We expect formal announcements of the full team in the coming weeks, which will include some very talented operatives not yet named.”

This is also extremely frightening for those Republicans who have stood against Trump’s agenda, or Trump himself, as the Pac could figure to be very active in attempting to primary those Republicans.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said that Trump would be helpful to all incumbent Republicans, but he may want to check with Rep. Liz Cheney on that.

“The president is going to be helpful to all Republican incumbents on the Senate. We’ve got a great slate of incumbents,” he said to Fox News on Friday.

He said that Trump will be “working and is currently working on assisting Republicans in their attempts to defeat Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, and New Hampshire.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Sen. Rick Scott sent a message to Republicans asking them to join forces and stop fighting each other to focus on defeating Democrats.

“But now is not the time for division and here’s why: For the first time in any of our lives, socialism has become the unabashed, governing policy of the Democrat Party,” he said. “The Democrats are fast abandoning any pretense of allegiance to the first and second amendments to our Constitution, they’ll give up on the rest of it in due time.”

But it is unlikely that many Republicans are going to want to vote for the GOP members of the House and Senate who voted to impeach and remove Trump.

Trump To Form A Super Pac To Help 'America First' Republicans - Conservative Brief