In response to concerns by Canadian officials who openly despise the mass trucker protest against the vaccine mandate and called protesters racists, GoFundMe announced on Friday that the truckers who raised millions of dollars from people around the world would be cut off from the funds. GoFundMe announced that instead, it would be stealing the funds collected by the Freedom Convoy account to redistribute to its own inevitably leftist charities.

Facing legal backlash from Florida and Texas for its corrupt actions, GoFundMe backtracked its threat and agreed to return the donations, but the fundraising site shouldn’t be let off the hook. GoFundMe proved what many Americans already knew to be true about tech companies: They will gladly collude with governments to silence dissenters and smear peaceful protesters as extremists.

As part of their trending tab, Twitter editorialized discussions happening on their platform comparing Whoopi Goldberg’s two week suspension to Gina Carano’s firing.

They wrote, “Following Whoopi Goldberg’s two-week suspension from The View for comments regarding the Holocaust, people discuss actor Gina Carano’s firing from Disney’s series The Mandalorian for comments comparing COVID-19 restrictions to the Nazis’ treatment of Jewish people.”

This is entirely alarming when viewed for what it is. //

It’s proof that the narrative proliferation worked because Heidi Heitkamp, who had clearly never seen what Carano had said, declared she was a Nazi without about as much thought as she had proof. It’s proof that Carano’s name had been drug through the mud enough that the baseless accusation stuck, othering her in the eyes of many Americans.

And finally, Twitter’s continued proliferation of the narrative shows either a willingness to reinforce the lie or the unwillingness to speak against the lie.

The bottom line here is this: Carano warned against fascism and corporations continue to bow to the fascists she spoke out against.

This single event should have been one of the most alarming wake-up calls in recent history that our media has fallen to truly evil influence. It’s proof that corporations are willing to blindly accept the narrative that they’re given by political radicals. Carano was the canary in the coalmine.

The content advisory is on the wrong people — not the people who need to be questioned even more.

But the funny thing about those “content advisories.” When they originally started putting that stuff on music, it made people more interested in looking at it. If the powers that be don’t want you to see it, it tends to make you want to see it all the more. The controversy has made even more people look at Joe Rogan, then wonder what the heck the controversy is and doubt the media even more. So basically the left shot themselves in the foot with this effort and just made their effort to control the narrative more obvious.

Matthew Rosenberg
@AllMattNYT
Joe Rogan is what he is. We in the media might want to spend more time thinking about why so many people trust him instead of us.
3:36 PM · Jan 30, 2022

“Maus” is an interesting work of art that uses cartoons and text to make a valid point. But as an avid reader and cartoonist, and as a parent who once had children in 8th grade, I don’t think “Maus” is the best literary source to tell the story of the Holocaust — whether as history or as language art. Would I have objected to its use as a parent? Probably not, but McMinn County made the call to remove it from one grade’s curriculum, as age inappropriate. That is all it did. It didn’t ban Spiegelman’s graphic novel.

But a good and useful lie was launched, and McMinn became a lightning-rod for the left and the “twitterverse.”

Never let a good lie go to waste.

Per those on the left, including Democrat politicians, “white supremacy” had won because the filibuster is a “Jim Crow relic” only used by virulent racists. Don’t believe me? Just ask Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ayanna Pressley

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley
@RepPressley
It’s time to abolish the Jim Crow filibuster so we can restore voting rights & keep power in the hands of the people.
10:00 AM · Jan 11, 2022

But then something incredible happened. Literally hours after the Democrats embarked on a major offensive to abolish the filibuster as a tool of racists everywhere, they then…used the filibuster. They didn’t just block any bill either. They did Russia’s Vladimir Putin a solid by blocking Ted Cruz’s bill to sanction the Nordstream 2 pipeline.

Frank Thorp V
@frankthorp
And 6.5 hours after the vote began, a GOP bill to impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline has FAILED, 55-44, needing 60 to pass.
9:44 PM · Jan 13, 2022

You couldn’t have scripted this any better, and I’m pretty sure Ted Cruz knew exactly what he was doing here. He timed things perfectly to once again show what rabid hypocrites the Democrats are. That the bill was stopped also represented a massive win for the Russians was just the cherry-on-top. The White House actually spent the last week lobbying for Putin in this case.

But remember, it’s Republicans who are soft on Russia.

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who is also a doctor, who went there on the DARPA report. First, Marshall notes that there were more deaths under Joe Biden than under President Donald Trump. That’s the chart you see behind him in the following video. But then he tells Fauci that 59 percent of Americans didn’t trust him. Fauci replies that that was a real “distortion of reality.”

Next, Marshall hones in on the gain of function research lie. He noted how DARPA rejected a proposal but the NIAID didn’t reject it under Fauci. Marshall asks why had Fauci previously said that they hadn’t funded gain of function research when the report indicated that they had. He also asks if Fauci would commit to providing all the documents on this subject — unredacted — to Congress by the end of this week.

Fauci denies that they had funded the grant, but Marshall says they would have all the supporting information available. Fauci’s response to that is crazy, claiming that Marshall was “backing down from this,” which didn’t match what Marshall had said. Fauci just keeps saying that Marshall is incorrect, so Marshall challenges him to provide all the unredacted information.

It’s one thing for a media outlet to issue a correction after a political figure and/or their handlers have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the outlet was factually incorrect. It’s another thing entirely for a media outlet to reframe a story and their promotion of it to something more favorable to that politician just because their inner circle had hurt feelings over it.

We saw a similar disturbing instance of the media colluding with Democrats to soften coverage of Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign when the New York Times admitted they changed how they described Biden’s alleged inappropriate touching of women because the Biden campaign complained about it.

Perhaps what fascinated me the most was the blatant statements many regular people are making about Democrats and Biden. It’s not just the “I did it” stickers at the gas pumps. It is now a cultural phenomenon. Not just a rural one, but it’s spilling over to the suburbs. People are not as afraid to be vocal.

Whether it was visiting one of the tourist traps on Duval St. in Key West on New Years and seeing all anti-Biden paraphernalia for sale, to overhearing loud conversations in Noble, Oklahoma, at a local diner, I noticed that the right is finally getting vocal after being silenced for so long, especially when Trump was president. //

It was never about Donald Trump. Trump was merely a vessel that needed to happen. I’m not even white, but I have felt this attack against American values and heritage for decades now. When I had clientele from the liberal Hollywood elite, one said something powerful to me, “America has no culture.” I chose not to respond but in my head, I was thinking, “Wow, I love American culture, our history, our success.” That shocked me. She was a white liberal who came from the heartland, in the Midwest, but was there so much self hatred, she couldn’t see how great this country is?

Fast forward about 15 years later, the Democrats are even more self-hating about America. I took a road trip across country, one of many I’ve done in my lifetime. Never have I seen so many Trump signs. Rural and suburban America were quiet for so long but now they are tired of being silenced. “Let’s Go Brandon” was the perfect moment for America-loving Americans to express their frustration without being nasty. Compare this to the behavior and nastiness from the left in cities during the Trump years (and even continuing until today).

“First, let’s stipulate to an undeniable truth of history,” writes talk host, Steve Deace in a series of Twitter messages about the media, “whoever has control over the flow of information in any society ultimately has control.” And it’s why Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies want to have a bigger stake in local news.

During the last couple of days, PJ Media has highlighted an effort by the Facebook (now Meta) founder and other moneyed interests and foundations to save local newspapers and local news sources. Their idea has been to spend millions of dollars to embed reporters, in a program called Report for America (RFA), in America’s newspapers and public radio stations. Their stated objective is to tell “under-covered” stories in those cities, hamlets, and burgs out of the goodness of their hearts. //

But Zuckerberg’s overtures via the Report for America program can’t help but remind us of what Journalist H.L. Mencken is credited with once saying. “The urge to save humanity,” he said, “is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” He continued in the lesser-known second part of his axiom saying, “Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” And so it is here.

And they use the one thing from which all local news sources suffer: a lack of money.

Because the news outlets must come up with only 25% of the salary of the Report for America soldier at first, the bait goes down easily. But, if past is prologue, there’s a hook. As I’ve forecasted, there will be trade-offs like there were when Democrats allowed Zuckerberg’s “Zuck Bucks” to buy their way into local election offices before the 2020 elections. //

Their bias isn’t in favor of objectivity or what we used to know as media fairness; it goes only one way. Their goal is to achieve political objectives, which they frame as the only true “democracy.” The term is being redefined in real-time.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. in a Washington Post piece called “The rise of pro-democracy media” claims that “America’s news media is increasingly covering the growing radicalism of the Republican Party and its democracy-eroding behavior.” [emphasis added]

Canadian lawyer and popular YouTuber David Freihart has a term for that. He calls it “confession through projection.”

Now, what is this “democracy-eroding behavior”?

Well, coincidentally, it turns out that “democracy” is what the Left wants! This appears to be the destruction of norms, voting sanctity, borders, traditions, institutions, faith, the individual, the Constitution, and objective truth. For the moment, it is, Bacon claims, the “questioning of election results, targeting of election officials and push to ban discussions of race relations in schools [critical race theory, DEI] … and support for voting restrictions as the dangers to democracy that they are.”

The “pro-democracy” news media, Bacon says, is therefore no longer wasting time doing “a problematic ‘both sides’ approach to covering politics.” He says that the media could dispense with that “after Donald Trump became president,” because he claimed, reporters “couldn’t avoid covering him very negatively.” //

I have no doubt that some good coverage will come from this program, but let’s not kid ourselves; don’t expect any reportage on the “under-covered” areas of any western faith, preserving private property rights, border security, the U.S. Constitution, how farmers use water to grow food for the world, heroism, or individual freedom.

The erosion of trust in the Fourth Estate has been coming for a while as the mainstream media adopted a change in the way it does business.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee plans its colonoscopy-like partisan investigation, few have been held to account for the violent riots that laid waste to a once vibrant, dynamic Minneapolis and many other cities. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association report in 2020, an estimated 574 violent riots took place in the weeks after Minneapolis burned, resulting in damage of up to $2 billion.

Pelosi made sure the capital was locked down and surrounded by the National Guard and coils of concertina wire, city leaders and governors left citizens at the mercy of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails, helpless as their homes and businesses burned to the ground.

America’s preeminent revisionist historian Nikole Hannah-Jones perfectly encapsulated the elitist mentality in a June 2020 CBS interview: “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” //

In his Tuesday op-ed, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “What happened last Jan. 6 was much bigger and more important than politics.” Of course it was, because it was about the elitist political and corporate media establishment. They continue to inflate the severity and lasting effects of the Jan. 6 riot because they have an outsized idea of their own influence and importance. The disparity of concern and reaction is telling: when their lives are inconvenienced, it’s a national disaster; when our lives are destroyed, they hand us a shovel.

Any suggestion of a threat to America’s credentialed class is presented as an affront to democracy and a sin equal to the worst treason in our nation’s history. Meanwhile, the destruction of dozens of cities and thousands of lives in middle America has been accepted as a necessary airing of grievances, a reactionary event in the name of social justice that inflicted pain on those who probably deserved it anyway.

It is an iteration of the divide between those who see themselves as rulers and the people over which they rule. It extends from the leftist media that needs to perpetuate democracy’s threat to fight off the ratings implosion since President Trump left office, to sanctimonious politicians who view the public as nothing more than the masked, faceless unwashed who should be grateful that the 2020 riots exposed their racist ways and now can correct them.

Our national elite is united enough to have the vices of a ruling class, but not the virtues. In particular, they are cohesive enough to be perceived as oppressive by much of the populace, but they are rarely gracious and conciliatory when needed. They know how to make enemies, but not friends.

Culturally and ideologically, America’s elites have consolidated into a regime, with Big Tech, the legacy media, academia, Big Business, the entertainment industry, and, of course, the leaders of the Democratic Party, all singing from the same hymnal, even if they sometimes squabble over the key. But many citizens refuse to join in. //

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //

The regime has similarly decreed that racists — by which they mean anyone who won’t repeat the dogmas of critical race theory and “anti-racist” hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo — should be suppressed throughout public education, academia, and even the business world. Similar trends abound throughout the centers of entertainment, finance, culture, and even the newly woke military.

There is nothing democratic about this. Indeed, it is the elites who threaten our democracy, such as when corporate media colluded with Big Tech to censor accurate reporting about Biden family scandals, or Big Business imposes economic sanctions on red states over everything from election laws to LGBT issues. The hypocrisy of it all rankles.

Woke capital’s CEOs wave rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners at home while using slave labor abroad. Democrats and supposed policy experts pushing to ban misinformation are often leading disseminators of it, from the Russian collusion hoax to the dismissal of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin. //

Elites are inevitable; their legitimacy and continuity is not. Ours lack the virtue and wisdom needed for good governance and leadership. Instead of expertise, they offer incompetence, malice, and herd-like conformity to self-serving ideological fads. Hopefully, political defeat and cultural failure will force a reckoning.

That’s right, it’s been a banner year for speaking truth to power, preventing democracy from dying in darkness, and sexual healing.

The corporate media continues to hit home run after home run, elevating the discourse, and making sure we all know that no matter what our lying eyes tell us, we’re getting a happy ending.

As such, it’s difficult to drill down to the most heroic of the heroes 2021 has delivered, but as I’m also something of a hero, I did the work. In doing so, I distilled the heroic number of heroes down to five, though I also encourage you to do the work. We’re all in this together. //

Chris Cuomo: Bravery in Covering for Your Brother, Whose Deviant Proclivities You Share

Jake Tapper: Bravery in Being More Partisan Than the Elected Democrats You Interview

Chris Wallace: Bravery in Admitting You’re Not So Objective After All

The charge Didion brings against Woodward, that he only obtains insider information by protecting the interests of those insiders, she also levels against the entire industry.

“The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal,” wrote Didion. “In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

In the book, that essay appeared under the headline, “Political Pornography.”

Elon Musk @elonmusk says the woke mind virus is "arguably one of the biggest threats to modern civilization." pic.twitter.com/JqLmb1Sqm8

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 22, 2021 //

Wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool. Trying to shut down Chappelle, come on man, that’s crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation, and hate?”

He continued, “At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be cruel, armored in false virtue.” //

@elonmusk On Twitter Battle With Senator Warren

"She called me a grifter & a free-loader who doesn't pay taxes basically & I'm literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year, ever. And she doesn't pay taxes basically at all." @TheBabylonBee pic.twitter.com/jQZzvhBVRr

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) December 22, 2021

“She struck first. Yes, she did actually call me a freeloader and a grifter who doesn’t pay taxes. I’m literally paying the most tax that any individual in history has ever paid this year, ever, and she doesn’t pay taxes, basically. And her taxes and salary is paid for by the taxpayer like me. If you could die by irony, she would be dead,” Musk said.

Upon determining by clear and convincing evidence that the health of others is or may be endangered by a case, contact or carrier, or suspected case, contact or carrier of a contagious disease that, in the opinion of the governor, after consultation with the commissioner, may pose an imminent and significant threat to the public health resulting in severe morbidity or high mortality, the governor of his or her delegee including, but not limited to the commissioner or heads of local health departments, may order the removal and/or detention of such a person or of a group of such persons by issuing a single order, identifying such persons either by name or by a reasonably specific description of the individuals or group being detained. Such person or group of persons shall be detained by a medical facility or other appropriate facility or premises designated by the governor or his delegee.

In addition, reported The National Pulse on Monday:

The bill would “require an individual who has been exposed to or infected by a contagious disease to complete an appropriate, prescribed course of treatment, preventive medication or vaccination,” essentially giving the government the right to detain anyone they want and forcibly vaccinate them. //

While the proposal suggests that no individual or group can be held for more than 60 days, the language allows for court orders to waive the maximum detention time. After 60 days, the court is allowed an additional 90 days to consider detention, a cycle that can last indefinitely per the opinion of the department.

While Stern describes the situation in a grossly dishonest way, he reveals the true issue. The argument is about who controls what your children are taught in the way of values. Should you, as a parent, be required to pay taxes to support and send your children to a mandatory system of schooling that indoctrinates your children on issues of race and sexuality and even governance that you find appalling?

Or can you opt-out?

Along the way, Stern confuses the concept of “public education” with a system of state-funded schools. Those things are not the same. Under the case debated by the Supreme Court, a parent can send their child to a state-funded school if they wish. Stern would take that freedom of choice away. In other words, he endorses the position of Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign.

Corey A. DeAngelis
@DeAngelisCorey
Terry McAuliffe: "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

9:58 PM · Oct 26, 2021

Trump didn't 'defend' calls to 'hang Mike Pence,' and anyone who has listened to the audio clip knows it. //

If you’ve read any headlines or been on Twitter this morning, you’ve probably heard the news: Donald Trump justified calls to “hang Mike Pence.” But if you listen to the interview that supposedly supports this wild claim, you’ll soon learn the corrupt media is at it again. It’s just not true. //

In order to get the full picture, you must listen to the audio, not just look at the transcript, because the exchange didn’t occur in a back-and-forth Q&A format as the media portrays. //

Kylee Zempel
@kyleezempel
The media shamelessly pretending Trump defended calls to hang Mike Pence are acting like they’ve never heard a Trump rant.

Karl clearly interjected the “hang Mike Pence” question in while Trump was already off and running.

8:52 AM · Nov 12, 2021

If you look at the inner-city areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, or New York, you find a laundry list of issues, from homelessness to rampant crime to cold-blooded murder, almost exclusively attributable to a liberal-socialist policy that has been codified into law. And what does the progressive-left say is the answer? Whaddya know! More Government. More Socialism.

That doesn’t mean that Conservative policies don’t often require force to implement or that those policies don’t create problems bigger than those they intended to fix; it’s just that Conservative policies do those things less often. If Conservatives stuck more often to Conservative principles, they would seek to remove the barriers and triggers which create the problems we are seeing in the first place, the majority of which can be sourced back to the government. Libertarian-leaning conservatives, such as me, are so often frustrated because we watch so-called “conservatives” believe that the answer to the problems caused by socialist policies is simply more government, in the hands of these “conservatives.” What makes conservatives who engage in this action hypocrites is that they are acting like the very liberals they criticize. //

This brings us back to the statements made by the Former President on Monday at COP 26 Climate Summit in Scotland. As always, Obama started with some pandering nonsense which led him to commit what is, to my people, a grievous cardinal sin:

“Since we’re in the Emerald Isles here, let me quote the bard, William Shakespeare, ‘What wound,’ he writes, ‘did ever heal but by degrees.'”

Yes, while the President spoke in Scotland, he suggested they were in Ireland and quoted an Englishman. //

“I can afford to give up a lot of my current lifestyle to benefit the planet because I’ll still have a lot left over. A lot of folks don’t have that cushion. So that means that any climate plan worth salt has to take these inequities into account.”

That leaves me with just one question: What the hell is stopping you? //

If, again, climate change was such a grave threat to our existence, and immediate action is necessary, why would you only give up some? Why would you not give it all up? Why wouldn’t you take the totality of the action available to you, with as much immediacy of which you were capable, to combat climate change? And why is it that Obama thinks he can state so openly and plainly that he just isn’t doing anything and is waiting for others to tell him what to do when he is there, demanding action? Would not the sentence, “I have given everything up to help contribute to climate change goals,” or even “Here is the immediate action I am taking to help combat climate change,” serve his agenda better than, “Welp, someone hasn’t made me do anything yet.” Is the left’s only motivation for an action done so at the end of a barrel of a gun? //

No one in socialism sees themselves as “the worker.” They all envision themselves as some grand societal architect, and that they, in their endless benevolence, will do what is best for the rest of the plebes. It is only when they realize that they too will have to live under the rules they are setting, that they seek ways to create exemptions for themselves, because well, their benevolence has earned it. Obama’s words are no different. He wants to plan. He wants to discuss. He wants to pontificate. But when the sustainable rubber hits the road, he has less than zero intention of ever committing to, let alone engaging in, any meaningful change in his life.

But while Democrats far and wide continue to state that CRT is not being taught in any public school classrooms, some in the education system are speaking out, including Tony Kinnett, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a “District Science Coordinator & Instructional Coach at Indianapolis Public Schools.”

Kinnett, who says he “writes the science curriculum for over 30,000 students,” took to the Twitter machine earlier today and posted a short video explaining that yes, CRT was being taught in the public school system there, but not under the official banner of “CRT.” In other words, the typical deceptive word games are being played by leftist educators in the state in an attempt to assure concerned parents that schools there are not doing what they are, in fact, doing – just under different wording so parents won’t actually realize it’s CRT:

One veteran who served in the first Gulf War and in Afghanistan, and who participated in that 2008 rescue with Mohammed spoke exclusively to RedState about the withdrawal, about that “rescue” in February 2008, and about Mohammed, who we now know as Aman Khalili. Though his experiences were more than a decade ago, he was still emotional as he shared them with me. It’s important to hear these stories of individuals translators, knowing that there are thousands of men like him who believed in what America stood for and were willing, just like the men and women of our Armed Forces, to die for it.

The veteran still has family members on active duty, so we are honoring his request that his name not be used in this piece:

“In leaving both Americans and Afghans who helped us, like Mohammed, behind, Biden and the guys in charge went against over 200 years of military mindset and honor. We don’t leave anyone behind. If you look throughout Marine Corps and Army history you’ll find where four or five soldiers or Marines died to save one. We promised the interpreters we would protect them. We have to keep those promises, because if they don’t have confidence that they won’t be left behind, how do you get a guy to stay in a war zone?

“And, we knew that the Afghan Army wouldn’t stand once we left. If it takes 40 years to get from a lieutenant to a general, why could we think we could build their army in 20 years? And knowing that it wouldn’t stand, how could we leave without a plan to get everyone out?

“In Afghanistan, every interpreter was afraid for their life. Even back in 2008, they were whacking interpreters. So for him to be an interpreter, it’s like you’re putting yourself out there on Main Street for everybody to see you. Interpreters very seldom left that gate without their faces being covered. Even in 2007-2008, we knew that the guys in the Afghan Army and the Afghan police might turn on you. You only wanted to take an interpreter you could trust when you went outside the wire.

“Mohammed was a trusted interpreter. As a young guy he’d been a fighter against the Russians, so he had a vested interest in Afghanistan’s future. We knew all of the interpreters and their reputations, and one reason we took Mohammed with us that night was the fact that we knew he wouldn’t turn on us.

“For example, interpreters weren’t allowed to carry a weapon. But, a couple of times it was really ugly and I took my pistol off and gave it to him. One of those times we were working with the 7th Group to get an HVT, high-value target. We were the outer cordon for the mission. For special operations units, their biggest fear is being surrounded once they’re on a target, so our goal was to set up a blocking force, to go down the road and make sure nobody comes up. They told us, ‘No matter what, don’t stop.’ Well, the truck behind us ran off the road but we never stopped. We had to get that roadblock up down there. We threw up the roadblock, but now the trucks we’re supposed to have with us weren’t with us anymore. This is one of the first times that we were truly operating in the real world at night. I took out my pistol and gave it to him. I told him, ‘You get stupid and I’ll shoot you.’ Of course, he didn’t [get stupid].

“On the night of the rescue, the 82nd Airborne controlled the AO or the area of operations. The unit I was with was the QRF, or quick reaction force, for the Bagram zone. The QRF got a call that a helicopter with a VIP has had to make an emergency landing in the mountains in an area that’s known as Afghanistan’s equivalent to the Ho Chi Minh trail, a big area where weapons, ammunition, and the Taliban flowed through. We knew the Taliban would find out they were there in no time, so the race was on to see who would get to them first. //

“So, we loaded up into our pre-staged vehicles and grabbed a few interpreters, including Mohammed, and then two or three up-armored Toyotas joined us. I didn’t know who they were, but I knew that those Toyotas would bring the VIPs down.

“I’ve seen some questioning why Special Forces or Delta or SEALs and those guys weren’t called in for such high-level VIPs. Well, that’s because it wasn’t in their area of operation. It was the 82nd Airborne’s AO, and they already had a QRF in place.

“It was snowing when we left Bagram, and we were probably looking at a 20, 25-mile trip one way. We were probably at 7000 feet and going up to about 10 or 11,000 feet. As we went up into the mountains, the snow started getting deeper, to the point where the snow was knee and thigh deep. Bill McClain, the squad leader, was in the lead vehicle and was the true hero of that part of the mission. It started snowing so hard that it got to the point where you couldn’t see the road anymore. Stopping wasn’t an option, but on this road driving off the road was driving off of a cliff. At the edge of the road, it went straight down. McClain is a guy who could find his way blind; somehow he just knew where he was going. So he started to walk the trucks up, walking alongside us so we wouldn’t drive off the road. //

“We got up the hill and after securing the area and making sure the VIPs were going to be safe, we got them loaded up in the up-armored Toyotas to get to them to the base. A piece of the platoon escorted the up-armored Toyotas and the VIPs off the hill, and the rest of the platoon stayed up with the helicopters for three days until the weather cleared and the pilots could get the helicopter. //

To show you how little Kerry knew about how things work, when we’d laid out the chains to put on the tires to make the trip down the hill, he kicked them out of the way as he walked by. So we had to lay them back out again. //

“The military doesn’t care that the military left. What the military cares about is leaving people behind. It’s not in the military’s nature. The Woke generals have violated an oath that’s been in place for nearly 200 years. That’s why many veterans are coming apart, because how do you square this with our military tradition? You can’t. In my opinion, Biden made a deal with the Taliban to get out. But why?

“For those involved in the withdrawal, it had to have been heart-wrenching to know that you’re leaving your people behind because it goes against everything we’ve been taught.”