Stephen L. Miller

Joe Biden has held the fewest press conferences and interviews of any president since Ronald Reagan. And now we’ve learned that when he is allowed to take questions, they appear to be pre-selected, approved by White House staff and agreed to by reporters in the White House pool. Yesterday, while appearing alongside South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, Biden fielded a question from Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times. A photojournalist captured a notecard in Biden’s hand that showed an avatar of Subramanian, the words “Question 1” and a pre-written text of the question she asked the president.So how does a question from a White House reporter make it to the president of the United States’ hands before she even asks it?

Good riddance to BuzzFeed News. There is no other way to put it. BuzzFeed and its subsequent news division spin-off did more harm to the online journalism industry than almost any other media outfit. It placed importance on churning out content and putting twenty-something undertrained interns in charge of some of the most socially volatile news issues on the internet and in American culture. Their journalists became churnolists and the amount of content became king, not the quality of content. As media cancel culture continues to rear its ugly head and journalists still roam the countryside to make their audiences outraged about...

The ugliness of the American media is on full show in the aftermath of a tragic mass shooting at a Nashville Presbyterian school, which left three staffers, including the head of the school, and three children, all nine years old, dead. Police identified Audrey Hale, a twenty-eight-year-old woman and alleged former student, as the shooter. Late yesterday, police chief John Drake confirmed that the biological female identified as a trans male.

If Glenn Youngkin’s appearance on CNN this week tells us anything, it’s that Republicans still need to learn the lessons of the network’s Parkland town hall from back in February 2018. High school survivors, on stage in front of the country, were permitted to paint Senator Marco Rubio as a blood-soaked murderer. Now disgraced sheriff Steve Israel was allowed to whip the crowd into a frenzy, enough to the point where Dana Loesch, then spokesperson for the NRA had to be escorted out of the arena with security. CNN wanted the Jerry Springer-type environment and they got it.  All this unfolded under the watchful eye of moderator Jake Tapper, who once worked for gun control lobby group Handgun Control, Inc.

Rachel Levine, the United States assistant secretary for health, has become a lightning rod for attention and controversy in the Biden administration. Levine is a nonbinary transgender woman who, as a biological male, was married with two children. Levine was named Woman of the Year by USA Today. When the Christian satire website Babylon Bee published an online post calling Levine “Man of the Year,” Twitter suspended the Bee’s account, which was then unsuspended under new Twitter owner Elon Musk. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has put Levine front and center in the cultural and medical fight over treatment for minors under eighteen who claim they are trans.

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning to figure out what his intentions are with the platform and how that pertains to platform moderation going forward. Musk is seemingly making up Twitter policy on the spot by tweet — and then asking his team to come up with a justification post-tweet. This has happened on several occasions. His actions all came to a head Thursday night when Twitter, apparently under the direct instruction of Musk, suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the New York Times (Ryan Mac), the Washington Post (Drew Harwell), the Intercept (Micah Lee), Mashable (Matt Binder), Voice of America (Steve Herman) and CNN (Donie O’Sullivan).

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition last week as part of a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The suit claims that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor information surrounding the origins and circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as information that went against CDC guidelines and mandates around vaccines and efficacy masks. Fauci, the NIAID and chief medical advisor to President Biden (and others), didn’t say much. In fact he used the term “I cannot recall,” or some variation, over 190 times.

Americans: watch your backs. Last week, Forbes released a bombshell report that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, the popular video recording and meme app, was planning to monitor and track the physical location of Americans. It’s not the first time there have been national security and human rights questions swirling around ByteDance, the China-based technology company that owns all of TikTok’s offshore data and could easily be leveraged by the Chinese government. Forbes would not specifically say which Americans ByteDance was targeting, but it would not be too farfetched to assume they would be influential figures in media and politics — the same folks China tracked during Hong Kong’s volatile freedom and democracy protests.