SO NOW THEY WANT THEM BACK: Sarah Holliday of The Washington Stand has everything you need to know about how and why the Pentagon suddenly wants those thousands of service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine to return.

Class-action lawsuits are in the offing, and, while I am generally not enthusiastic about trial lawyers (perennially among the most generous donors to Democrats) and class-action litigation, it would not break my heart if these succeed quickly and spectacularly.

ABOUT THOSE ANCIENT CULTURES’  ‘THIRD GENDER:’ Ever heard of the “Muxe” or the “Sal-Zikrum”? Those are examples from ancient cultures that today’s transgender ideologues like to cite as proof of an alleged third gender that renders irrelevant the “gender binary” of male and female.

But as is detailed in the latest “What Would You Say” video from the Colson Center on HillFaith, there is more — and less — to the story than the transgender fanatics claim. If you have a high school or college kid in your household, they really need to see this one.

I know, I know; this shouldn’t have to be said, but, given the depressing state of affairs of American public and higher education these days, it must if the next generation is to have any surviving connection to reality.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL INSTAPUNDITEERS: A day for thanksgiving for all the blessings that have flowed into each of our lives.

MORE J6 REVELATIONS: When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) opted to make public all 40,000 hours of January 6 Capitol videos, he empowered hundreds of reviewers unencumbered by Trump Derangement Syndrome. The result is likely to be disastrous for a lot of powerful people in Congress and thereabouts.

Consider this new report from Just the News, which found video of a Metropolitan District of Columbia police officer explaining “we go undercover as Antifa.” One of the most significant lingering questions about January 6 is how many undercover local and federal law enforcement officials were encouraging the crowd. More to come, so stay tuned.

TWO GOOD NEWS STORIES MSM IGNORED: Ben Johnson at The Washington Stand points to two positive news stories on the right-to-life issue in North Carolina and Wyoming, both of which were utterly ignored by the Mainstream Media.

SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE SAID BUT IT DOES: Believe it or not, the Social Justice Gospel is attracting adherents among evangelicals. That’s why they need reminding that Christians should support limited government (and show backbone in doing so). It’s an important installment in The Stream’s Foundations Series on HillFaith.

UNIPARTY STRIKES BACK AGAINST TUBERVILLE: When the Senate returns next week, one of the first items on the agenda is likely to be S. Res. 444, authored by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) ostensibly to enable consideration of groups of military nominations, thus negating the holds placed on them by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) to protest the Pentagon paying abortion travel expenses.

But the backstory to this saga is the damage that will be done to the Founders’ vision of a cautious, deliberative Senate capable of checking assaults on individual liberty and common sense by temporary House majorities. Read all about it in my latest Premium Report for The Epoch Times.

ABOUT THAT CCP BIOLAB IN CALIFORNIA: The more is revealed about that biolap being run in a “unoccupied” warehouse in Reedley, California, the more startling it becomes that this thing was unknown to the feds. Consider these facts compiled by Leslie Eastman on Legal Insurrection:

• The illegal biolab was run by a PRC citizen who is a wanted fugitive from Canada with a $330 million Canadian dollar judgment against him for stealing American intellectual property.
• This PRC citizen was a top official at a PRC-state-controlled company and had links to military-civil fusion entities.
• The illegal biolab received millions of dollars in unexplained payments from PRC banks while running the illegal biolab.
• The illegal biolab contained thousands of samples of labeled, unlabeled, and encoded potential pathogens, including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and Covid.
• The illegal biolab also contained a freezer labeled “Ebola,” which contained unlabeled, sealed silver bags consistent with how the lab stored high risk biological materials. Ebola is a Select Agent with a lethality rate between 25-90%.
• The biolab contained nearly a thousand transgenic mice, genetically engineered to mimic the human immune system. Lab workers said that the mice were designed “to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”
• After local officials who discovered the lab sought help from the CDC and others, the CDC refused to test any of the samples.

Consider that this biolab would still be operating had not a local government code enforcer not been curious about a hose sticking out of the warehouse. Which prompts a question: When is somebody at CDC, the FBI and the DOJ going to be fired for all of this?

IRS COMING FOR YOUR CRYPTO: The Cato Institute’s Nicholas Anthony is warning that an obscure 2022 report from the Department of Justice makes the case for the IRS confiscating crypto-currency with or without a judge’s consent. Let’s see now, isn’t there an amendment or something in that thing, you know, the Constitution that would bar such confiscation?

REMEMBER THE ‘RED DIAPER BABIES’? Dr. Sy Garte was born to parents who were members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), so it was no surprise that he grew up to be an atheist.

As it happened, he also had a great passion for science and an intellectual openness to the unexpected. Becoming a follower of Jesus Christ was just about the last thing Garte expected, but it happened and he explains how and why on HillFaith this morning.

CAR GUYS DON’T DIG EVS: Remember the GTO? How about the Plymouth 383 Road Runner? Don’t forget Chevy’s SS396, the Olds 442, Ford 390 or Dodge Super Bee, either. Car guys (like me and a lot of other Instapunditeers) of a certain age absolutely love’em. But, as The Epoch Times reports, they don’t love Electric Vehicles (EVs). I mean they really, really don’t. No points and plugs to change. No timing to set. No fun.

RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT: What two words would you choose to characterize the Biden administration? Reckless endangerment are the two selected by Issues & Insights and here’s why:

“Interest payments are through the roof. Real wages continue to fall. And a record number of illegals crossed the border. That’s just the domestic news. As of this writing, Americans are being held hostage by Iran-supported Hamas terrorists who killed nearly two dozen other Americans when they invaded Israel.

“Our military forces face increasing Iranian-sponsored attacks in Iraq and Syria. While President Joe Biden lets Iran off the sanctions hook for another four months. The worry isn’t just whether Biden – the architect of these disasters – will be voted out of office next year. It’s whether the U.S. can survive until then.”

That’s exactly what I worry about.

GUESS WHO FUNDS THOSE DNC PROTESTORS: It’s George Soros, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross.

NEXT SUPREME COURT TERM: It could be a very difficult one for supporters of the Administrative State, according to The Epoch Times’ Supreme Court reporter Matthew Vadum. He says two cases that will be argued in January 2024 are especially important.

“The two most-watched cases, Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce (court file 22-1219) and Loper Bright Enterprises Inc. v. Raimondo (court file 22-451), will be heard back-to-back on Jan. 17.

“In Relentless and Loper Bright, the court may narrow the application of the so-called Chevron deference doctrine that the Supreme Court articulated in the 1984 landmark ruling, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“In Chevron, the court held that while courts ‘must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress,’ where courts find ‘Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue’ and ‘the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.’

“In other words, Chevron stands for the proposition that when the meaning of a statute is unclear, an executive agency’s interpretation of a statute it administers is entitled to deference unless Congress has said otherwise.”

Well maybe not much longer.

ARE MIRACLES HOAXES? Maybe, maybe not, according to the Colson Center’s latest “What Would You Say?” video on HillFaith. It’s not always unreasonable to conclude something beyond MEST is the most logical explanation of a phenomenon. (Matter, Energy, Space, Time).

REMEMBERING WES PRUDEN: My assignment this morning is to give a talk on journalism ethics to a class of aspiring young reporters and editors. In preparing, I was reminded of a lecture given in 2002 at the Heritage Foundation by my newsroom mentor, Wes Pruden, who was then the Washington Times’ editor.

He told this story in his lecture about a small town Arkansas politician talking about his young son. As it happened, this politician disliked journalists intensely:

“He’s a wonderful little boy. His mother and I love him more than we love life itself. We have such big dreams for him. If it turns out, in the fullness and passage of time, that that little fella has above average intelligence, and we certainly think he does, we hope to make a preacher of him, to send him out to preach the Gospel, to lead sinners to God.

“And if it turns out that he has just average intelligence, well, that’s all right, too, and we’ll just send him to law school. God has His uses for all of us, even for lawyers.

“But if it turns out that that little boy just doesn’t have a lick of sense, God will give us the grace to live with that, too. We’ll just send him downtown to be the editor of the morning newspaper.”

It’s a lecture worth recalling today.

SENATE DEMS MOVE TO KILL TUBERVILLE DOD HOLDS: Senate Rules Committee Democrats unanimously voted to adopt a temporary procedural change that allows them to circumvent holds on President Joe Biden’s Pentagon nominees by Sen. Tommy Turbeville (R-Ala.).

Tuberville first put the holds on the nominations of generals and admirals for promotions in February after Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a directive that the Pentagon would use federal tax dollars to pay the travel expenses of women in the U.S. military service who have to cross state lines to get abortions.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS GUY: James “Fergie” Chambers inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his family, which controls the Cox Enterprises media empire. Then Fergie started spending his millions to support “making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public. We need to make all of white America afraid that everything they have stolen is going to be burned to the ground. That’s what makes them listen.”

Jessica Costescu of The Washington Free Beacon has more.

DON’T BE FOOLED BY ‘FAITHFUL AMERICA:’ It’s a George Soros-funded Far-Left wolf in sheeps clothing, presenting itself as representative of conservative American evangelicals and Catholics.

In fact, according Hayden Ludwig, director of Research for Restoration of America, writing in The Federalist: “Faithful America was spawned in 2004 as a project of the Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), which specializes in incubating new lobbying groups with funding from the Ford Foundation and Warren Buffett’s pro-abortion foundation. We’ve traced five- and six-figure grants to Faithful America from Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Arcus Foundation, a transgender mega-donor.”

And guess who Faithful America is now targeting – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has made no bones about his evangelical Christian faith being the center and source of his very populist conservative perspective.

TRUMP/JOHNSON TEAM IN 2024? Not as a president/vice-president ticket, but rather as an engine of reform. It will almost certainly come about if Trump is returned to the White House and Johnson retained as Speaker of the House.

YESTERDAY, IT WAS AYAAN HIRSI ALI: Today on HillFaith, it’s MIT’s Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., a former atheist scientist who became a Christian. Not only is Picard a scientist of world renown, she is also an inventor, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer.

You may also have read her book, “Affective Computing,” which, according to her MIT bio, “proposed and described how to give skills of emotional intelligence to computers — including voice assistants, robots, agents, and many kinds of interactive technologies.”

IT’S EVEN WORSE ACROSS THE POND: The Free Press reports on the case of “John A,” a working class Brit who dared to say out loud what millions of his fellow citizens likely think but fear to speak. The Woke mind-virus is serious here, but judging by the condition of the London Metropolitan Police and this from Tucker Carlson, things are going to be rapidly getting much worse.

REALITY CATCHING UP WITH GREEN ENERGY: Remember when President Joe Biden invested $370 billion in Green Energy with his “Inflation Reduction Act”? That’s when he declared it to be “the most aggressive action ever — ever, ever, ever — in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic — our energy security.”

Well, it’s been more than a year since and Issues & Insights took a hard look at the present realities of the American economy and the energy industry: “Electricity prices are up 3 percent since Biden signed that bill into law, and up 24 percent since he took office. Overall energy prices are unchanged compared with August 2022 and are up 44 percent since January 2021.”

But wait! There’s more!

“Well-paid jobs? According to the White House, ‘between January 2021 and March 2023, the economy added 11,000 jobs in electric power transmission and distribution, 8,000 jobs in solar power generation, 2,000 jobs in wind power, and 1,000 jobs in hydroelectric power.’ We’re not math geniuses, but that doesn’t seem to add up to “hundreds of thousands” of new jobs.”

And more!

“General Electric now expects to burn up $1 billion this year and again next year because of its offshore wind project losses, according to Bloomberg. Fortune magazine reports that “Siemens Energy shares fall 40 percent after company seeks government help as wind-turbine woes threaten gas and power division.”

Click on the link and, as Glenn says, just keep scrolling because Issues & Insights covers all the bases.

THIS IS THE REAL MIKE JOHNSON: Wow, can you believe this – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has in the past endorsed a proposal whereby the people of the United States — you know, THE sovereign power, aka “We the People” — would do in 2023 what we did way back in 1784.

That is, call a convention of delegates representing each of the states to consider amendments to the present Constitution and recommend any the majority of them think should be submitted to the states for possible ratification. I mean, the horror of such a thing, the ultimate illustration of republican democracy in action! OMG, they could repeal the EPA, stop the government from borrowing more trillions of dollars, even limit how long anybody can serve in Congress!

Clearly, Politico thinks Johnson should be thrown out, not just of the Speakership, but also out of the House of Representatives and indeed out of American public life because he is obviously a mortal threat to our existing — i.e. Progressive — order.

THE CORE EVIL THAT IS DEI: Bari Weiss of The Free Press began grappling with the rottenness now known as the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) movement two decades ago as a college student. Early on, she recognized it for the threat it has become:

“What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

“People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: ‘Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.'”

Even today after 20 years of aggressive Woke infiltration and infection of the academic, political, philanthropic and corporate worlds, otherwise sane people still often fail to recognize that DEI is a disease that threatens civilization itself, not just one particular ethnic group.

“End DEI,” which is part of the “What Now?” Tablet symposium featuring a number of thoughtful authors with something significant to say one month after the Hamas massacre in Israel, will go a long way to further public recognition of this reality.