In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.
And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless.
[…]
The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered.
“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”
In The New Republic
I am pornography. Granted, it's not necessarily the first thing you'd notice about me. That is to say, I am not the subject of pornography, but the thing itself, 24/7. It's jolly tiring, I can tell you.
The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.
Though Project 2025 does not define “pornography,” their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the “normalization” of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls “gender ideology.” Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. “Pornography,” Roberts continues, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” And how should it be outlawed? “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” Project 2025 is not targeting “pornography” as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography.
The US Bill of Rights? That's pornography. Have you seen what's in it? Can you imagine how exposure to that sort of thing might harm children?
Speaking at the McCain Institute on Friday alongside Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Romney lamented Israel’s inability to control the flow of information out of and about Gaza, despite its best efforts to restrict press access.
“I mean, typically the Israelis are good at P.R. What’s happened here? How have they—how have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?” Romney asked Blinken, seemingly in disbelief that images of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza have prompted outrage in the United States.
Then Romney explained that the TikTok ban overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress because of the widespread Palestinian advocacy on the app.
“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard,” Romney said.
At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Michael Knowles took the main stage and called for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life” to a standing ovation. Not long after, Project 2025 (led by the Heritage Foundation) published the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 900-plus-page blueprint for the next Republican administration. The first legislative item in the executive summary declares that “transgender ideology” is a form of pornography, and that all pornography should be outlawed. It then goes on to call all trans people “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.” It further demands that anyone who is a “purveyor of transgender ideology” be put on sex offender lists and imprisoned.
This an explicit call to make being transgender illegal, and to put anyone who fails to flee or detransition in prison, or maybe camps if there are too many for the existing system to handle. This is already the solution Donald Trump is proposing for other “undesirables.” It’s not coming from fringe organizations: This is the mainstream of the GOP. When Trump promises to be a dictator on day one, it’s so that he can implement draconian policies and laws like these. Average Americans might think, “Surely we would never go this far? This sounds positively Naziesque, and it is, and we’re better than that, right?”
Wrong.
We already have the first state proposing bills to do exactly this (and more) less than a week into the new legislative year. By January 17, more than 200 anti-transgender bills have already been filed. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 197 defines the existence of transgender people as “obscene” and bans them from being within 2,500 feet of any school. Senate Bill 194 would not only ban all transition-related care for anyone over the age of 21, but would also require that all providers (including therapists of all types) attempt to “cure” them. It would define being transgender as a “sexual deviation,” like pedophilia, exhibitionism, masochism, sadomasochism, or fetishism. Senate Bill 195 in West Virginia would declare that any material related to being transgender is obscene, which would have far-reaching implications for the internet and the First Amendment.
Er… I think you'll find they can.
“We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”
[…]
Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.”
In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science