Getting Right to Work

I was intending to keep a little history here, recording President Trump’s actions on day one in office as the 47^th President of the United States. I went to the White House site for the official record, although it may be the count is off, because some items do several things at once, such as appointing cabinet and other staff, and granting clemency to multiple individuals. (Order is newest to oldest, or start at the beginning here.) 

President Donald J. Trump on Day 1, January 20, 2025
Image credit Doug Mills/New York Times

I’ll note here that there is a specific purpose for an executive order: to carry out the law. It is not an extra-constitutional privilege of the president to make law by circumventing the legislative branch. Previous administrations’ practices notwithstanding, executive orders are to direct how his administration will carry out existing laws. 

I read that there were, on day one, 26 executive orders, 12 memoranda, 4 proclamations, plus 75 Biden executive orders that were withdrawn (which aren’t included in the list). Another list had 40 items—plus the link to the official Presidential Actions website.

Today (January 24) there is one, I call it a proclamation, but the item itself doesn’t say what it is. It’s a sort of summary of the executive actions of the First 100 Hours. In it they (the White House) say:

Within the first 100 hours of his second administration, President Trump [has] taken hundreds of executive actions to secure the border, deport criminal illegal immigrants, unleash American prosperity, lower costs, increase government transparency, and reinstitute merit-based hiring in the federal government.

“Hundreds” is more than my list through the week. So they must be counting the multiple items within many of these. Or there are things he's doing, or announcing, that are not on the official list. This is to say, I don't really know how many there are. He's been very busy.

I thought I’d just list them items, and then comment on a few. And that is what I’m about to do. But I ended up also listing the additional executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations through Friday, January 24, because important things keep happening. That may continue to be true, possibly even on the weekend, and certainly next week. It’s leaving us breathless.

Here’s the list. And then we’ll talk.

January 20, 2025

1.        President Trump Announces Cabinet andCabinet-Level Appointments   (staffing)

o   Scott Bessent, of South Carolina, to be Secretary of the Treasury.

o   Pamela Bondi, of Florida, to be Attorney General.

o   Douglas Burgum, of North Dakota, to be Secretary of the Interior.

o   Lori Chavez-DeRemer, of Oregon, to be Secretary of Labor.

o   Douglas Collins, of Georgia, to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

o   Sean Duffy, of Wisconsin, to be Secretary of Transportation.

o   Peter Hegseth, of Tennessee, to be Secretary of Defense.

o   Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of California, to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

o   Howard Lutnick, of New York, to be Secretary of Commerce.

2.        President Trump Announces Sub-Cabinet Appointments  (staffing)

3.        President Trump Announces Acting Cabinet and Cabinet-Level Positions  (staffing)

4.        President Trump Designates Chairmen and Acting Chairmen  (staffing)

5.        Flying the Flag of the United States at Full-Staff on Inauguration Day  Proclamation

6.        Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions   Executive Order

7.        Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship   Executive Order

8.        Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government  Executive Order

9.        Return to In-Person Work  Memorandum

10.   Regulatory Freeze Pending Review  Memorandum

11.   Hiring Freeze  Memorandum

12.   Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis  Memorandum

13.   Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements  Executive Order 

14.   Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021  Proclamation 

15.   Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information  Executive Order 

16.   Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States  Proclamation 

17.   Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security Clearances for Executive Office of the President Personnel  Memorandum 

18.   America First Trade Policy  Memorandum 

19.   Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States  Executive Order 

20.   Unleashing American Energy  Executive Order 

21.   Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program  Executive Order    

22.   Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship  Executive Order 

23.   Securing Our Borders  Executive Order 

24.   Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California  Memorandum 

25.   Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety  Executive Order 

26.   Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture  Memorandum 

27.   Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives  Memorandum 

28.   Declaring a National Energy Emergency  Executive Order 

29.   Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects  Memorandum 

30.   Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid  Executive Order 

31.   Organization of the National Security Council and Subcommittees  Memorandum 

32.   The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Deal(Global Tax Deal)  Memorandum  

33.   Protecting the American People Against Invasion  Executive Order 

34.   Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential  Executive Order 

35.   Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats  Executive Order 

36.   America First Policy Directive to the Secretary of State  Executive Order 

37.   Establishing and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency”  Executive Order 

38.   Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government  Executive Order  

39.    Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing   Executive Order 

40.   Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service  Executive Order 

41.   Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists  Executive Order 

42.   Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness  Executive Order 

43.   Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion  Proclamation 

 

January 21, 2025

44.   Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation  Executive Order 

45.   Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity  Executive Order 

 

January 22, 2025

46.   Nominations Transmitted to the Senate  (staffing) 

47.   Executive Grant of Clemency for Andrew Zabavsky  Proclamation  

48.   Designation of Ansar Allah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization  Executive Order 

49.   Executive Grant of Clemency for Terence Sutton  Proclamation  

 

January 23, 2025

50.   Federal Recognition of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina  Memorandum 

51.   Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology  Executive Order 

52.   Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Executive Order 

53.   President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology  Executive Order 

54.   Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence  Executive Order 

 

January 24, 2025

55.   The First 100 Hours: Historic Action to Kick Off America’s Golden Age  Proclamation 

56.   Enforcing the Hyde Amendment  Executive Order 

57.   Memorandum for the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development  Memorandum 

 

Whew!

Some of the most notable are the promises kept to secure the southern border and to pardon and release the J6 political prisoners. There was hesitation on a very few J6 cases, because of actual violence, but they got their sentences commuted—that is, they were not exonerated like the 1500 or so others, but their time served is all that is required of their sentences, which were ridiculously harsh compared to criminals convicted of even worse violence but not related to J6.

He took on some woke issues right away. Another first day action was to declare that the federal government will only recognize two sexes: male and female. And no more DEI; the federal government is now merit-based—getting rid of illegal discrimination.

As exciting as Day 1 was, releasing all the classified documents related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK was noteworthy. I’m looking forward to getting some verifiable truth related to those—even if it reveals deep corruption within some three-letter agencies, which is I think what most of us expect to see. This is part of draining the swamp and clearing out the corruption; you have to see what slime you have to shovel out, so you don’t cover over a rotting foundation.

The exciting news added today was in the last executive order plus the last memorandum of the day. Enforcing the Hyde Amendment means preventing federal taxpayer dollars from going toward abortions or abortion services or providers. This had been in effect since 1980 (after 300,000 abortions had already been paid for with federal funds).

The original Hyde Amendment allowed for funding only in cases where abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. In 1993, the exceptions of abortions where the pregnancy had resulted from rape or incest were added (note that incest implies coercion, or technically rape, even though it wasn’t a one-time crime or was not repeatedly resisted by the victim). While Democrats such as Hillary Clinton ran saying they would get rid of the Hyde Amendment, no one had ever attempted it until Joe Biden in 2022. His first attempt was to eliminate the Hyde Amendment from an omnibus spending bill, but it was placed back in. So he did it by executive order. Trump’s executive order includes revoking two Biden executive orders from 2022:

·        Executive Order 14076 of July 8, 2022 - Protecting Access to Reproductive Healthcare Services 

·        Executive Order 14079 of August 3, 2022 - Securing Access to Reproductive and Other Healthcare Services [The link included in this week’s executive order did not have the right link for this, but I found it by the number.]     

It looks to me, from a quick read through the Biden executive orders, that he would simply not abide by the Hyde Amendment’s requirement not to fund abortions, because he supported abortion as a “women’s health care right.” This was in opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs decision in June 2022. So, thank you, President Trump, for taking care of this detail and removing our condemnation.

The memorandum that followed up was to prevent abortion funding to other nations, often through NGOs and non-profits and charities.

Vice President JD Vance, marching for life,
image from DC_Draino on Instagram

Another first day action was to declare an energy emergency. That might be a bit of a hyperbole. During the Biden administration, gas prices got pretty high, but they went down this past year, I’m assuming in anticipation of the election. The real concern has been preventing use of existing oil reserves, such as in Alaska, prioritizing some climate change faux science over actual energy needs. And there was the draining of the strategic oil reserves that Biden was pretty cavalier about. Add to that an expected increase in energy use with electric vehicles and with increased use of AI. So, maybe we weren’t exactly in a crisis, but we needed urgent changes. And those of us living here in Houston, up the road from the energy corridor of the energy capital, appreciate it.

Another big one was ending birthright citizenship. That one deserves an entire post, maybe another day. Let’s just quote the 14^th Amendment, Section 1, in case you need a refresher:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States AND SUBJECT TO THE JURISDICTION THEREOF, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I highlighted the part so many people fail to notice. This isn’t for persons who are accidentally born here when a mother with a visitor’s visa goes into labor during a vacation; such a child would still be a citizen of the mother’s and/or father’s country. In fact, people from our protectorates, such as American Samoa, who can freely visit here, are not entitled to citizenship merely by being born here. The purpose of the 14^th Amendment was to cover those persons who had been born and living in the country but denied citizenship during slavery. This amendment was ratified in 1868, shortly after the Civil War. It was much later (about a century later) that someone got the idea of applying this to illegal aliens, creating “anchor babies.” This is a correction of that misinterpretation. (Robert Gouveia does a good discussion here.) 

President Trump has said it will not affect those previously born here (prior to January 20, 2025) under the prior administration’s interpretation of the Amendment. So, all those people out there claiming he’s throwing young people out, some of whom have never known another country—get a grip. He’s just making sure the world no longer comes here thinking that, if they can just have a baby here, who would get citizenship, then that might be their ticket to being allowed to stay. President Trump is removing that illegal-alien magnet. And, of course, it’s going to be litigated.

There’s plenty more to cover, but this will suffice for now. And from here we just get to see how it plays out. My guess is that a very high percentage of these executive orders will bring us back into balance, and closer to the Constitution. And that will be a good thing.

Parental Rights Policy at the School Board Meeting

I spoke at the Cy-Fair ISD (independent school district) school board meeting Thursday night—for one minute. Actually, less than that, because I was waiting for a signal at the microphone, which I shouldn’t have done, so I lost about 10 seconds and didn’t get through my last two sentences. Anyway, the subject was a proposed parental rights policy, to align with state law, and to clarify some things for our district. While there was more in the policy related to parental rights (having access to records and educational materials, requiring parental permissions for such things as surveys and data collection of the child), the controversial part was about transgenderism.

Cy-Fair ISD School Board votes on parental rights policy, January 16, 2025,
screenshot from here

A couple of months ago, the Board passed a policy stating that students will use the bathrooms and locker rooms appropriate to their biological sex at birth. That got some backlash as well, but not as much as this one.

This one includes the following:

·       When a child presents as other than his or her biological sex at school, the parent must be informed.

·       No educational materials are allowed that support or indoctrinate or teach that gender is fluid or other than biological sex is allowed. Nor can a teacher or other staff share any such material, or online links to such material from their private collections.

·       Reasonable accommodations, such as using a different name or opposite-sex pronouns, can be made for a trans child at the request of parents, in consultation with the schools. If a teacher or staff member doesn’t feel comfortable complying with such decisions, accommodations can be made for that teacher or staff member.

I’m paraphrasing. The actual policy is pages 27-29 of the agenda, here. 

The policy comes on the heels of nearby Katy ISD, which instituted the policy in 2023 and has now had a year of implementation. Ours was not copied from theirs. At some point I plan to set them side-by-side, but as I look briefly, the ideas are similar, but this is not a copy and paste. I was privy to some discussion about this policy a couple of months ago, and felt my concerns and suggestions were heard and respected. So I knew the policy was being worked on, but I had not seen it until after Monday’s Board meeting work session.

We successfully elected six of the seven Board members (there were only 6 present at Thursday night’s meeting) because they aligned with our beliefs—instead of the woke agenda of the previous members. So I knew how the vote would likely go. But I also knew the room would be filled with opposition, and I thought they could use some support.

The One-Minute Speech

So, anyway, here is my one minute—and then I’ll say a bit more of what I couldn’t share in so brief a presentation.

I’d like to speak in favor of the proposed parental rights policy.

At Monday’s work session, the similar Katy ISD policy was referenced. The news story that followed mentioned that the effect of the Katy policy was 23 students in that district “being outed” to their parents last year.

Let me rephrase that: 23 sets of parents did not have their rights abrogated by the school district, who otherwise would have.

There are many supposed rights that a minor child does not get, among them: the right to publicly “change their identity” while enlisting the schools to keep that a secret from their fit parents.

It was mentioned, threateningly, that Katy ISD is under investigation for civil rights violations, and we would bring on such an investigation here. But which is better: fight an investigation that will verify that our policy adheres to the law? Or fight some 23 lawsuits annually from families whose parent-child relationships were seriously damaged because of the school’s unlawful violation of parental rights?

The fact that parental rights would be violated by school personnel without such a policy shows the need for it.

 

That's me, speaking in favor of the parental rights policy,
at the CFISD School Board meeting, January 16, 2025,
screenshot from here

More to Say

At Monday’s work session, there were some statistics given that I’d like to respond to.

We have about 115,000 students in our school district. Based on a supposed 1.4%, or 14 per thousand, there would be about 1600 trans and nonbinary students in the district. (That would be 17 per campus, although elementary schools should be much lower rates than high schools, so you might presume much fewer elementary students, and maybe up to 30 in a high school.)

That sounds high to me. I checked with research I’ve used before. A 2015 study showed the number of trans people in the adult population to be between 1 and 5 per 1000, with best estimates at 3 per thousand. While I won’t go into this here, statistics have altered significantly in the last couple of decades; prior to that, males claiming to be females were almost the totality of trans people, with almost zero females claiming to be males.

I found a 2022 study that showed the number in the population to be about 6 per thousand when ages 13-17 are included, but recognized the number as steady for adults (which is the 1-5 range, possibly still 3 per thousand).

The number for ages 13-17 is 14 per 1000, which is 3-5 times higher than the adult population. Either:

·       Young people are becoming gender dysphoric at much higher numbers than a decade ago; or

·       Young people who think they are trans resolve those feelings by adulthood; or

·       Both of those could be true.

Fourteen per thousand, as they claim, if one assumes most of the 13-17 would become adult trans people, would be a 5-fold increase in a decade. That is unlikely to happen; it’s a current high school phenomenon.

While the media would lead you to think trans people are everywhere, the odds of having any among your acquaintances would statistically be an anomaly, unless you have many thousands of acquaintances—or you seek them out intentionally.

If there are that many, assuming the human race does not change that rapidly (for such a change, you’d need many millennia—and a population that reproduces), the most likely reason for this relatively large number in high schools is social contagion. If it is social contagion, then we need to stop whatever is causing it.

And that’s why we’ve been working on the curriculum and materials.

Our policy would remove pro-gender-fluidity materials from libraries and instructional materials. The news told us this similar policy resulted in Katy ISD “tossing out” some 400 books. If there were 400 such books in their libraries, in addition to other influences in curriculum, that would lead one to believe the social contagion theory. And we already know similar numbers could be found in our school district.

To be clear, they are not “banning” books when they choose not to buy and place into circulation materials that do not adhere to the educational purpose and standard of the district. We’re not talking about burning To Kill a Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn, both of which I read together with my children; we’re talking about books that graphically depict—in words as well as pictures—deviant sexual acts with children. The actual message of “you’re not the only one this has happened to” in reference to such acts is to normalize them. (Someone expressed in their one-minute speech it’s good for children to see such things in literature, so they can relate.) Normalizing oversexualized behavior in children, whether forced or consensual, is called grooming; it is a step in victimizing the child. Normalizing gender fluidity is putting the idea into a child—and affirming the idea as a social good—which looks an awful lot like recruiting into a belief cult.

More About the Meeting

I could go on about the topic. I’ve written about it here, here, here, here, here, and here, and probably other places I didn’t find in a quick search. And I’ve written even more on other LGB topics. But for now, let’s get back to how the meeting turned out.

With one member absent, the vote was 5-1 in favor of the policy. It passed. The lone vote against was the predictable Julie Hinaman, the one board seat we were unable to flip. She disagrees with the other Board members on almost everything. The opposition side is definitely organized. There was a group called Cypress-Tomball Democrats that took up more than a couple of long rows, and wore matching blue T-shirts; they stood whenever one of their number spoke. (CFISD is in Cypress, northwest Houston, and Jersey Village, but not Tomball, so some of these may not have even been from our district.)

The room was packed, almost no empty seats. I and two others spoke in favor of the policy. The other 31 who had signed up to speak all spoke against it. I could summarize them all:

·       You’re all hateful, you bigots.

·       Parents of trans kids are almost all abusive. They kick them out on the street.

·       Schools should be a safe place for LGBTQ+IA kids; all those other kids don’t matter. [I don’t know what all the extra letters and symbols mean.]

·       If you don’t give trans kids all the support they insist on, you’re causing them to commit suicide.

·       This Board should be doing things that matter, like bringing back all the bus routes and dealing with discipline and violence. [The board is, of course, doing those other things. It’s not this instead of that. Also, there’d be more time for the other, if there wasn’t so much time taken up by these protesters.]

A number of speakers were teachers. They stated blatantly that they support keeping parents in the dark about what their kids do in school. And there was a parent who said he’d much more trust a trans kid than a parent of a trans kid.

I did get booed, by the way.

Also, I got asked by the media to do an interview afterward. It was scary enough to get up in front of several hundred people to give my one minute with a room full of—dare I say it, frothing mob of intolerant sex-obsessed haters. But I said yes to the interview. It was KHOU. They were kind, and it didn’t turn out too badly, although I’d just as soon never do that again.

One question they asked me was why I came. I had to think about that, and how to say it. This was not on camera. But, I knew how the vote would turn out. I just wanted to support my friends on the Board, and offer a little something that probably no one else was saying.

What really happened was, when I woke that morning, God put it on my heart. I felt I needed to do it, and I needed to get my name on the sign-up list to speak before noon. So I did it.

I didn’t feel physically threatened; police officers were plentiful. But that room had been full of venomous hate. So I suppose it was kind of brave. I was shaking afterward, and it took until bedtime to get my pulse to stop racing. I guess I was stressed.

There was another issue on the agenda that got similar treatment. It related to whether to change a health class from required to elective. Health includes sex-ed, but that can be opted out (rather, it must be opted in specifically, I believe). One speaker told us Christians that, if we’re against that health class, we must favor more abortions, even in a state where they’re no longer legal, because this class teaches how to avoid unwanted pregnancies, so without it being forced upon all students, we’ll get more abortions. 

So, again, the intolerant crowd wants to force every child to be indoctrinated their way. Or, if you assume there is some good information in the class (I’m sure there is), no family should have a choice about it, even though all the materials related to state testing will be handled in other classes. The choice to make it an elective passed, so no one who wants to take it will be missing out.

Ironically, the meeting started with an annual “honor the school board” presentation, with love and affection coming from all the schools and staff, in a short, heart-touching video. And then the room full of haters told them how horrible they are.

So it’s all the more reason to support our brave Board members, who have to face the hate more constantly and publicly than I faced in my little adventure. It’s a lot of work, and they do not get paid. We should thank them for their hazardous-duty service.

Related News Stories

·       Houston Chronicle  “Cy-Fair ISD board may adopt controversial policy that 'outs' transgender students to their parents” 

·       Houston Chronicle  “Conroe ISD trustees plan to make a new gender fluidity policy” 

·       Houston Chronicle  “Katy ISD’s transgender policy under civil rights investigation by Department of Education” 

·       Houston Chronicle  “Katy ISD will require teachers to report transgender students to parents” 

·       Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act 2025  H.R.28 — 119th Congress (2025-2026)All Information (Except Text) 

Ironic Timing

I’ve been writing this blog since March 2011. I’ve written over 1400 posts. I never got censored—until last month, when my December 7 post was taken down by Blogger. It was about the House report on the response to that illness I guess I’m not supposed to talk about, even though I was referring to the findings of a government committee (and even though I had literally written freely on the issue dozens of times since 2020).

For many years I have followed up my posts here with a post on Facebook linking to it, to make it more convenient for friends to find what I’ve written.

I had a sense I’d been shadow banned a couple of times on Facebook, but no way to prove it. I don’t spend a lot of time (any) trying to get engagement, so if there’s less, I could hardly tell. Sometimes those little notices showed up, warning people about possible misinformation, with a link to some “trusted” source—which, as a result of that House report, we now know was actually a link to propagandistic misinformation. But Facebook had never given me a warning or taken down a post. Until last Friday.

I wrote about the enumerated powers in the US Constitution. I’ve written about that a number of times before. Talking about what’s in the Constitution seems pretty safe from violating “community standards.” I posted late in the evening on January 2. Facebook immediately removed it and told me I had violated community standards. They didn’t say what specifically I had done. I clicked, to see if they would tell me more, before I had taken a screenshot, which I regret. I was just so surprised. So I may have missed a clue.

I protested that I had not violated community standards and asked for a review. They said they would get back to me, and that usually takes 4 days, but could be longer. Today makes a full week. There is no word. There is no way, that I have discovered, to find out anything about the post. My account has no strikes against it and is in good standing, it appears.

I have read through the community standards. I cannot find anything that I may have violated, even inadvertently.

One thing I have noticed, just the past month or two, is a change in other accounts on Facebook that link to outside content. I first noticed it with Dinesh D’Souza, and later with various people from the Daily Wire—Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles. I’m sure there are others doing it. (Maybe everyone else got a memo that I didn’t.) They make a statement, just words on a colored background. And you have to click on comments to get a link to the linked material. I find this really annoying. You can’t even get the title of what is being linked to until you go to the comments, so you don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes you don’t get a full idea of what the content is about until you click through to the actual linked article, which is only worth it if you really trust the source and seek more of their content.

I see no advantage to the content provider—unless it is to avoid some obscure (unfindable) Facebook rule about linking to somewhere beyond Facebook. One would think that, when you’re on another platform, and it asks you if you want to share, and Facebook comes up as one of the buttons to make that easy, that it would mean Facebook is good with sharing such content, assuming it doesn’t violate their other community standards, many of which are reasonable to avoid theft, fraud, libel, child exploitation, and other actual crimes.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg announced just this week, Tuesday, January 7, that they are removing their fact checkers, and letting go of the whole censorship gig they’ve been providing for the current regime. He doesn’t sound like he’s crazy, or lying. I guess we'll see.

Mark Zuckerberg makes announcement about
changes to Facebook. Screenshot from here.

Here are the things he listed that Facebook/Meta is going to do:

1.      Remove fact checkers; replace them with Community Notes, similar to X. [I found a description of Community Notes here.]     

2.      Simplify content policies; get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

3.      Change enforcement policies; no longer filter for any and all policy violations; focus on illegal and high severity violations; no action on lower severity violations until someone reports an issue.

4.      Bring back civic content; this means political content can be recommended again, because people are ready to see this content again. [I’d like to say more about this overt censorship, which he seems comfortable with doing, based on their subjective sense of what people want to see, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.]

5.      Move US-based content review to Texas, rather than in California, where bias has been an issue. [The next day there was a surprise announcement to PolitiFact that Facebook would no longer be using them; that means huge layoffs for them. I’m not particularly sad for them.]

6.      Work with President Trump to push back on pressure to censor in other countries. While the US is the most pro-free-speech nation, with the Biden administration pushing for more censorship, other countries have been emboldened. There’s hope for support from Trump.

I guess things will be phased in. As of today, the community standards still say you can’t say anything against any kind of jab, because they want to uphold their certain beliefs (which, as I said, Facebook never actually censored me for; only Blogger, a Google platform, did that). I don't know about other topics.

I did a little research, to see if censoring linked content was a thing. Linked content is a problem. Facebook, and for that matter pretty much any platform, wants users to stay on the platform. But their practice has been to demote the content, with an algorithm, so it gets seen by fewer people. Not surprising, actually. Facebook has taken that further by sometimes adding a warning, such as, “Are you sure you want to follow this link?” as though wherever you’re going might be a threat to your computer safety. (It tends to work; many people see that and think, “I don’t want to risk it.”) But I didn’t find anything to say that they actually removed your content for having an external link in it.

Putting the link in the comments is indeed a way to “hide” the external link. And I think that will have to be what I do in the future. However, the drawback is that phone users have a harder time accessing the comments. So it’s a tradeoff: use a link and get fewer views (or in my case, get the post removed entirely), or put the link in comments and make it harder for people to view it.

If I’m wrong and my “violation” wasn’t the external link, but was content related, I don’t know how to solve that. Do they really find a discussion of the enumerated powers of the Constitution a risk to public safety? It may be that fact checkers actually do believe that.

In case you read here regularly, in late October I wrote a piece about the death throes of the "propaganda beast." I got censored after that, on two platforms that had not censored me before. So was I wrong? I don't think so. I think this is just part of the thrashing out of a cornered, dying beast.

There’s a fact checker (not used by Facebook) that I actually refer to frequently, called JustFacts. They back up what they say with data and, well, just facts. (As a result, they do appear to lean conservative.) Yesterday’s (January 9th) email included a response to the Mark Zuckerberg news, with links to 21 fact checker fails. I’ll include that portion of their email below, along with the links:

Facebook’s “Fact Checkers”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is “going to get rid of fact checkers” because they have “been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

 

For years, Just Facts has been documenting that Facebook-approved fact checkers like PolitiFact have incessantly spread falsehoods that support left-wing agendas. Here’s 21 glaring examples and the actual facts that refute them:

 

1) Covid-19 death rate

2) Market value of Mar-a-Lago

3) Biden’s role in the murder of Laken Riley

4) Income taxes paid by illegal immigrants

5) Late-term abortions

6) mRNA Covid vaccines

7) Violent crime trends

8) Effects of the federal “assault weapons” ban

9) Democrat Party’s role in the Ku Klux Klan

10) Impact of Obamacare on Medicare

11) Tax rates paid by the wealthy

12) Child hunger rates

13) Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq

14) Arming teachers

15) Pace of illegal immigration

16) Crime rates of illegal immigrants

17) Twitter misinformation

18) Antifa’s role in the Capitol Hill riot

19) Illegal voting by non-citizens

20) Live birth abortions

21) The “bipartisan” border security bill