IT’S OKAY, THERE’S NOT A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION UNTIL 2028: Expert concerned U.S. not prepared for bird flu spread in humans.

DISPATCHES FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: UK secretly orders Apple to let it spy on iPhone users worldwide.

During Conservative Boris Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister, the UK government claimed to be in discussions with Apple about creating a backdoor into iOS that would allow it access to all user data. If there really ever were such discussions, they will have been short because US company Apple has refused the FBI the same thing.

Now the new Labour government in the UK is demanding that Apple create this backdoor, according to The Washington Post. Under UK law, it is a criminal offense for Apple to even reveal that such a demand has been made, and so consequently the company has refused to comment.

Sources said to be familiar with the matter, however, say that the UK is demanding total access, a blanket capability to read encrypted material from any user, anywhere in the world. The demand has been served on Apple from the UK’s office of the Home Secretary, and is based on a 2016 law that authorizes the government to compel companies to assist in gathering evidence.

Formally known as the UK Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, but informally called the Snoopers’ Charter, the law initially had its controversial elements removed. In 2016, following objections from Apple and others, the act was passed into UK law without this provision.

The elements were reinstated in 2024 following a Parliamentary debate. Apple said at the time that the elements being discussed could allow the UK to demand worldwide access.

“These provisions could be used,” said the company, “to force a company like Apple, that would never build a back door into its products, to publicly withdraw critical security features from the UK market, depriving UK users of these protections.”

This means that Apple would disable end-to-end encryption for UK users rather than allow a backdoor access that could be used to spy worldwide. However, despite Apple using the phrase “publicly withdraw,” UK law would actually forbid it from telling customers that it had weakened their security.

In Orwell’s 1984, at least Big Brother had the courtesy to remind you he was watching you.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Trump’s Youth Revolution.

News alert: Washington Post journalists are panicked that some DOGE employees previously worked at Elon Musk’s private-sector companies and “are in their early 20s.”*

The horror.

Outrage over Musk’s whiz kids reveals another progressive double standard: Young activists are praised when they are on the Left and denounced when they join the Right.

The Post, moreover, is blind to the real story. Trump may be the oldest man elected president, but he leads a youth movement that will shape politics for decades to come.

Trump shattered the cliché that Republicans are the party of seniors and Democrats the party of young people. And he’s staffing his administration with men and women who will form the next GOP governing class.

The Beltway is only beginning to grasp the implications. Young people not only define the cultural landscape. They carry the political categories they learn in their 20s for the rest of their lives.

Such is the power of youth that even losing candidates who win over young people have lasting influence. The young people who worked on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, were the liberal future.

Ron Paul’s collegiate supporters in 2008 and 2012 previewed the anti-Establishment, anti-war GOP. And Bernie Sanders’s bros and girls in 2016 and 2020 pointed toward the Democrats’ coming lurch to the Left.

When a youth-driven campaign wins power, the consequences are profound. Think JFK accepting the torch passed to a new generation of Americans. Or Reaganauts forging the doctrines that guided the GOP for 40 years.

* Curiously, up until last month, Washington Post journalists used to demand that full attention be paid to exuberant youth:

● Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed French lawmakers. Right-wingers boycotted and mocked her.

—The Washington Post, July 23rd, 2019.

● Why a 24-year-old gun-control activist is running to help lead the DNC.

—The Washington Post, January 10^th, 2025.

UPDATE: Paul Farhi of the Washington Post wants Musk’s young digital hooligans to keep off the USAID grass:

THE BIDEN ERA ENDS WITH ONE LAST “UNEXPECTEDLY”:

Every single month in 2024 just got revised down in today’s jobs report—by an average of -626k. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the BLS business employment dynamics data and the Philly Fed’s early benchmark suggest even bigger downward revisions coming in the next annual update.… pic.twitter.com/WCcaSzq5xR

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) February 7, 2025

Wait’ll DOGE starts going through those books.

ROBERT SPENCER: A Critically Important Trial Has Just Begun, and No One Involved Will Speak About Motive.

PHIL HAMBURGER: The Education Department and the KKK: Nativists originally led the charge for centralized education.

The Trump administration’s desire to dismantle the Education Department has inspired some alarm. Those panicking would do well to remember a key historical fact: One of the leading advocates of creating such a department was the Ku Klux Klan.

Congress authorized today’s Education Department in 1979, transferring authority over federal education policy from the 1953 Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The Constitution didn’t grant Congress regulatory or spending power over education, so for most of U.S. history, education was run primarily by states, localities, churches and parents.

In 1867, Congress created a federal education department, but the tiny department was confined to gathering information and was soon reduced to a bureau. Establishing an education department didn’t return as a popular ambition until the 1920s, when the KKK and other nativist groups made it an explicit goal.

Nativists had supported the 19th-century growth of public schools. They viewed foreigners and the nation’s existing religious diversity—especially Catholicism—as threats to the dominance of Protestantism. To defend their vision of Protestant Americanism, they demanded compulsory public-school attendance, especially in the 1920s.

As the KKK’s Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans declared at the time, “We’ll take every child in all America and put him in the public school of America. . . . We will build a homogenous people, we will grind out Americans like meat out of a grinder.”

The KKK pursued this agenda throughout the 1920s by supporting a bill that sought to create an education department and allocate up to $100 million annually in federal education spending. Unable to secure compulsory public education, the KKK wanted the bill’s subsidies to drive children into public schools that would secure, as Evans said, “the re-Americanization of our common Republic.” The KKK thus made themselves “friends of the measure” and in 1923 urged Protestants to “unite in one campaign” for the bill.

Like meat out of a grinder. Great image for public education.

AMERICAN’S PAPER OF RECORD:

Democrats Assure Americans The Millions In USAID They Gave Hamas Was Just For Gay Stuff https://t.co/SInwTMLP5r pic.twitter.com/m6xtGpgV7i

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 7, 2025

LIMITED TIME DEAL: TurboTax Deluxe 2024 Tax Software, Federal & State Tax Return. #CommissionEarned

HOME RULE HAS BEEN A DISASTER: Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Andy Ogles Introduce Legislation To Repeal DC Home Rule.

What other neglected responsibilities might Congress pick back up?

TOM COBURN KNEW ALL ABOUT USAID CORRUPTION: And it made him so angry that it helped build his case for creating USASpending.gov, the first-ever official web site to make public most federal spending. That was a huge step forward for government transparency. Many more are needed. Here’s the back story on USAID funding of a prostitution ring in India.

WAIT, WHAT? Legos Aren’t Gay Enough, Apparently.

HERE’S MORE OF THAT USAID HUMANITARIANISM IN ACTION:

I cannot stress this enough: USAID made a formal program to promote foreign countries to pass foreign laws and regulations to influence content moderation policies of US tech platforms. https://t.co/RTkF5g1Xz1 pic.twitter.com/hhhpWNEyNb

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 6, 2025

From the birthplace of freedom of speech as a constitutionally protected right to outsourcing government censorship to foreigners.

EVERYTOWN HAS ALWAYS BEEN ASTROTURF, IT TURNS OUT IT’S GOVERNMENT-FUNDED ASTROTURF: EXPOSED: Taxpayer Dollars Laundered Through NGOs to Everytown, Other Anti-Gun Operations.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Georgetown Law student group to host speaker linked to Israeli teen’s killing.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: USAID Funds Ended up at BLM (and You Might Not Believe Where Else). “Meanwhile, the DOGE boys have Democrats spewing nonsense even more nonsensical than usual.”

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Energizer LED Headlamp PRO (2-Pack). #CommissionEarned

THE ENEMY WITHIN: University diversity and inclusion staff raises BLM flag on campus to mark Black History Month.

TRUMP’S 5-D CHESS WITH THE DEEP STATE: Flopping Aces takes up the question of whether President Donald Trump’s multi-front assault on Leviathan’s arrogant, overweight, out-of-touch, anti-accountability workforce is evidence that the 47th Chief Executive is playing the Deep State right into a corner.

CHANGE: Trump orders key government agency to cancel all media contracts.

What they’re saying: “GSA team, please do two things,” a Trump administration official wrote:

Pull all contracts for Politico, BBC, E&E (Politico sub) and Bloomberg
Pull all media contracts for just GSA – cancel every single media contract today for GSA only.

Why it matters: President Trump is targeting the federal government’s media contracts after Elon Musk and his allies discovered millions of dollars in agency subscriptions to Politico Pro, a policy tracking service widely used in Washington.

The discovery, made through a U.S. government spending database that has long been publicly available, triggered erroneous theories on X about the Biden administration “funding” anti-Trump media.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that the executive branch would stop spending money on Politico subscriptions amid the right-wing outrage.

GSA manages real estate, procurement and technology services for the federal government. An X account for DOGE has also announced cuts to other individual deals, such as a Treasury contract with the New York Times.

Reality check: Politico’s executives addressed the false conspiracy theories about the company receiving “funding” from the government in a note to readers Thursday.

I wrote a little something about that yesterday:

When I wrote the column, it was an established fact that the U.S. government had paid $8 million in “fees” to Politico for their “Pro” service. NASA alone paid more than half a million dollars — and for what? For duplicative Pro subscriptions, estimated to cost between $7,000 and $15,000 apiece. If those aren’t backdoor subsidies to a lefty news outlet, then what are they?

Before the virtual ink had a chance to dry on my column, we learned that the actual total to Politico Pro was over $34 million. But even that number is hours old and perhaps subject to increase. That’s $34 million spent, as someone on X put it, for progressive bureaucrats to read what progressive reporters had spoken about with other progressive bureaucrats.

The gravy train is coming to a stop.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: President Trump Is an Existential Threat to the Uniparty. “It was easy to tell that the Trump transformation of the GOP was a good thing because the Dem lapdogs in the mainstream media kept complaining about it. They get upset when they lose one of their loyal useful idiots.”

THAT PLACE HAS BEEN SHADY FOR YEARS: DOGE Is Coming for the Bureau of Labor Statistics – Knees Are Already Knockin.’ “Over at the Labor Department, nervous Nellies have already filed lawsuits to keep Elon’s Wonder Boys out before they ever step foot in the building. Why so twitchy, I wonder?”

WE’VE ALREADY EXPERIENCED President J.D. Vance.

GEE HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? Egypt says it will work with partners to reconstruct Gaza without Palestinians leaving the strip.

It was just yesterday I wrote that Trump was making an opening move to force new responses from the rest of the world. So now Black responds.

NOPE, STILL NOT SICK OF ALL THE WINNING:

🚨 #BREAKING: President Trump has just signed an executive order requiring an audit of EVERY NGO which relies on federal funding, per Reuters

Biden gave BILLIONS to these NGOs to facilitate an invasion of our country.

Like the Red Cross, who was providing LITERAL MAPS to help… pic.twitter.com/azGgx7lqDE

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 6, 2025

TRUMP AND ELON ARE GIVERS; THOSE OTHERS ARE TAKERS.

People who become billionaires in private industry, and then go to serve the government decrease their net worth.

Yet somehow Clinton, Obama, Bush, Biden and all their top staffers increased their net worth after “public service.”

Funny how that works.

Lifelong public… pic.twitter.com/ryLKVY15c6

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) February 7, 2025