MUST-READ ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s speech to the “Rescue the Republic” gathering in the nation’s capital is a stirring call to protect every American’s God-given right to disagree openly and loudly with Officialdom’s accepted opinion.

It’s a lengthy oration but well worth your time in reading as it is full of wisdom about history, raw truths about the people who think they have a divine right to tell the rest of us what to think and say, and, most important, a heaping helping of good ole American orneriness. God Bless Matt Taibbi.

RIGHT THERE BETWEEN YOUR EARS: The most amazing, marvelous, incredible supercomputer ever seen on this good Earth, that is. It’s your brain, which, as John 10:10’s “Three Pounds of Wonder” video on HillFaith demonstrates, far outdistances even Frontier at Oak Ridge, presently the world’s most powerful manmade supercomputer.

WHAT ABOUT THE INDEPENDENTS? It’s a truism that elections in America are typically decided by the middle, and that made up mostly of independents. But a new survey highlighted today by Issues & Insights suggests the vast majority of independents are significantly more conservative than folks in the media would like the rest of us to believe.

HEART-BREAKING VIDEO: Millions of U.S. tax dollars continue to flow from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to labs in China that conduct research experiments involving things like severing the spines of Beagle puppies. The White Coat Waste Project (WCW) report that includes a video of a Beagle dragging itself around a lab with useless rear legs. Even if you aren’t a “dog person,” this video ought to make your blood boil.

‘PREFERRED PRONOUNS’ AND REALITY: There is a move afoot in certain evangelical quarters to convince Christians that they should bow to the demands of Transgenderism and use preferred pronouns.

But as the latest “What Would You Say?” video from the Colson Center on HillFaith makes clear, what is really being demanded is the obliteration of words as describers of reality and their being reduced to little more than expressions of unreal feelings.

IRS DIRECT FILE MAY BE DIRECT LINE TO HACKERS: New report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector-General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) finds significant risk that taxpayers using the Direct File program allowing IRS agent to prepare their tax returns could see their most sensitive financial information stolen by hackers. My latest PJMedia column has the details.

HARRIS LOSES TO QUAYLE: Just as Jimmy Carter sighed with relief over the fact Joe Biden relieved the Georgian of the “Worst President Ever” title, Issues & Insights reports that those uproarious laughs you may be hearing are Dan Quayle, who has been relieved by Kamala Harris of the undeserved (in his case) title of “Worst Vice-President Ever.”

HOW FAUCI’S INNER CIRCLE PROTECTED WUHAN: The full story of the relationship between Tony Fauci, the former NIAID Administrator and highest-paid federal employee in the country, and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology may never be known, but Emily Kopp at U.S. Right to Know advances the ball in a major way today.

“Some of the NIAID officials who helped [EcoHealth Alliance chief Peter] Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhances the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen.

“Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, congressional transcripts also show. Namely, [Fauci science advisor David] Morens and another NIAID employee named “Jeff T.” were the liaisons between the scientific community and Fauci during the years-long debates about gain-of-function research leading up to the pandemic, one email shows.

“After the pandemic arose, Morens and another NIAID scientist named Jeffery Taubenberger wrote an editorial defending EcoHealth and referred to people concerned about gain-of-function research as ‘luddites’ and ‘the complaining crowd.’

“Thousands of pages of grant proposals and other documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know show that EcoHealth planned to use the new NIAID funding to continue research similar to the work that had brought the group under scrutiny, using the very same viral samples. Most of the NIAID employees who helped Daszak maintain funding amid the pandemic still retain positions of influence at NIAID.”

That last sentence above is a big reason why you should take the time to read this report in its entirety.

ROADMAP FOR AMERICAN RECOVERY: Tim Goeglein’s latest book is “Stumbling Toward Utopia” and it is a truly excellent explanation of how the Left, including the Marxists, the “New” Left and the Progressive Democrats, brought America to where we are today. Check out my review over on PJMedia.

DO NOT MISS CHARLIE MARTIN’S PAGER REPORT: Over on PJMedia, Charlie Martin, who knows a thing or three about intel matters, assesses the significance and likely enduring impact of Israel’s exploding Hezbollah pagers. There is indeed much more to this amazing accomplishment by Mossad than first meets the eye.

WALZ UNIFIES BY DIVIDING? Well now, it appears Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, held racially segregated meetings for teachers and veterans, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Peter Hasson.

So, ever since Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the American consensus has been that racial segregation in public places is llegal. How did Walz and his prospective boss, Democratic presidential nominee and incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris, miss these two historic milestones?

Would it be possible for somebody — I don’t know, maybe an investigative journalist in the Mainstream Media? — to ask Harris and Walz both about this? And then insist in a followup question on a straight answer? I’m not holding my breath.

INFANTICIDE IS NOW OFFICIAL DEM POSITION: Stella Morabito, writing in The Federalist, points to, for example, the ABC News debate “fact-checking” Trump on infanticide as the latest evidence Democrats and the Mainstream Media elite have no problem with abortion any time and infanticide if the baby survives the procedure.

“We can see this in their repeated and overwhelming votes against legislation that would allow infants to live if they survive an attempted abortion. One such roll call took place as recently as January 2023, when a whopping 210 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

“On top of that we now have pro-abortion initiatives, such as Amendment 4 on this year’s Florida ballot, that serve as Orwellian word salads that officially open the door to unrestricted infanticide. For more on the Florida measure, read Margot Cleveland’s legal analysis.”

IS IVF ETHICAL? It comes as a bit of a surprise in this corner, but there are serious people with well-informed, credible ethical and moral objections, including those behind the Colson Center’s “What Would You Say” videos on HillFaith. My own mind is not yet made up one way or the other but I am very interested in how Instapunditeers view it.

IF THEY DIDN’T HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS: They wouldn’t have any standards at all. The Democrats’ legion of allies in the Mainstream Media, that is. Issues & Insights takes on this hypocrisy and makes the fundamental point.

The incivility and demagoguery that has poisoned American politics originated with a TV spot that was only broadcast once during the 1964 campaign. It told voters nuclear catastrophe would result if Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was elected instead of  LBJ, who succeeded to the Oval Office when JFK was assassinated.

A TASTE OF WHAT’S AHEAD FOR U.S. JOURNALISTS: Matt Taibbi at Racket News recalls a lunch gathering in Moscow back when being a journalist in Russia could be a fatal attraction. Now, the signs of something not unlike those days in Moscow are appearing here.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK OVERSEAS: Somebody in the U.S. Department of State approved spending $20,000 to stage a play in Macedonia to stage a stage play in which God is bisexual, depicts former President Ronald Reagan as a crazy homophobic, Marxists are the good guys and LGBTQ+ are glorified.

“Earlier in September, the State Department greenlit funding for a showing of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play ‘Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’ in North Macedonia, with the agency claiming the production will raise awareness about ‘LGBTQ+ issues’ in the country, federal grant records reveal, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Robert Schmad reports.

“The play follows multiple storylines, among them the ghost of convicted communist spy Ethel Rosenberg antagonizing dying conservative lawyer Roy Cohn and a gay man having sexually explicit visions of heaven as he struggles with AIDS,” Schmad writes.

Don’t know about you but, boy, I feel better knowing State Department political appointees and career activists in the American Foreign Service are so generous with our tax dollars overseas!

OLD-SCHOOL LIBERALS AND ‘EXPRESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM:’ If that term, Expressive Individualism (EI), doesn’t sound familiar, it’s from back in the day of the 1950s and 1960s when folks we know today as classical liberals held sway.

Robert P. George makes an important point in an AEI essay that, while such folks were clearly right on issues like civil rights and freedom of expression, they made what he calls “a grave error” in adapting the analysis of sociologist Robert Bellah’s EI.

“Thus was ushered in what I have termed the ‘Age of Feeling.’ Faith and reason as the objective arbiters of truth and goodness were essentially abandoned by liberals in the 1960s,” George explains.

“While lip service continued to be paid to ‘reason’ and, in mainline churches, even to some loose conception of ‘faith,’ for many people feeling became the standard of judgment — the ultimate measure of right and wrong, and of whether to perform (or approve of) an action or not,” George continues.

What Bellah called EI was not a new thing, of course, just a modern term for a very old problem among we humans — the desire to be subject to no rules, no limits and no laws, otherwise known as the idolatry of self.

ILLEGALS VOTING: Democrats and their media allies constantly claim voter fraud is a non-existent problem, but that’s not the view of experts interviewed by Ben Johnson of The Washington Stand.

“’A 2014 academic journal found that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008,’ Kerri Toloczko, executive director of Election Integrity Network and senior advisor to the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told The Washington Stand. ‘There are about 24 million noncitizens in the U.S. right now. If they voted only at the same rate of 6.4 percent this year as they did in 2008, they would account for 1.5 million votes,’ Johnson reports.

“That ponderous number of unlawful votes may just be the tip of the iceberg. ‘Based on the increased noncitizen activity at state DMVs, and the work of left-wing voter registration activists, this 6.4 percent could be much higher than it was in 2008. We could be looking at over two million unlawful noncitizen votes,’ she told TWS.”

THE VOID: That’s the title of a forthcoming Prager U documentary that digs into what may well prove to be the defining characteristic of Gen Z – depression, despondency and destruction. Check out the trailer here.

GROWING SCIENCE OF NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: Near and After-Death Experiences are no longer the stuff of hucksters, medical science fiction and folk tales, thanks to physician-researchers like Dr. Jeffrey Long.

He explains this morning on HillFaith’s Myth-Busters II what he has found in his investigations of more than 4,000 such experiences. And don’t miss the link to yesterday’s Myth-Busters I, which features Oxford Mathematics Professor John Lennox making his case that David Hume got it wrong on the impossibility of miracles.

WILL AI PUT US HUMANS OUT TO PASTURE? There are lots of folks, including most notably the ineffable Elon Musk, who are pretty sure Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to replace human intelligence in the not-so-distant future.

Not so fast, declares the Colson Center in its latest “What Would You Say” video on HillFaith. For one thing, AI is not even intelligence, at least as it is commonly understood these days. Of course, that could change ….

YALE STUDY FINDS LIBS PATRONIZE MINORITIES: New study highlighted by Yale School of Management finds that white liberals use significantly fewer competence-related words when speaking with minorities, according to Wintery Knight.

The study found no difference in how white conservatives talk to minorities, using the competence-related words metric. I’m sure the New York Times and Washington Post have already created reporting task forces to dig further into these findings!

IS CONGRESS UP TO ITS POST-CHEVRON CHALLENGE? When the Supreme Court nullified the Chevron Deference doctrine earlier this year, it threw down the gauntlet to Congress. Under Chevron, courts were required to defer to executive branch bureaucrats whenever there was confusion about congressional intent on a regulation.

Now, as I explain in my latest Epoch Special Report, with that deference no longer required, the monkey is on the back of Congress to tighten up the way it writes legislative authorizations to make its intent clearer and more precise as to what the bureaucrats can and cannot do.

But is Congress up for that challenge? Liberals love Chevron because it puts the bureaucrats in control. A lot of senators and representatives from both parties also love Chevron because it supposedly gets Congress off the hook for bad regulations.

But the Founders made Congress the First Branch for a multitude of reasons, the most important of which being to ensure the executive branch bureaucracy doesn’t become too powerful.

In recent decades, with the growth of the Administrative State, however, the bureaucrats are in control and Congress seems unable and/or uninterested in calling a halt and putting the executive branch back in its place.

They don’t like to talk about it, but responding to Chevron is among the most important challenges that will confront senators and representatives alike in the new Congress  come January 2025.

WHAT? HOUSE GOP, DEMS AGREE? Well, they both say the government has got to do a better job of combating waste, fraud and mismanagement. But … they don’t agree on how to do it.

STILL TRUST YOUR LOCAL NEWS? If you are following Maryland Matters, NC Newsline, Michigan Advance or another of the multiple local “news” outlets associated with States Newsroom, you need to watch this brief video from Capital Research Center (CRC). The cash funding these folks all comes from the Left.