It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files—the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship—was first published.

For six months, not much of consequence has happened, either in Washington or the mainstream media, in response. Those who owe us mea culpas have not provided them, tending instead to attack the individual reporters or ignore their findings.

Why? Because not many commentators understand the interconnected tendrils of a single censorship apparatus. Michael Shellenberger and his colleagues Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi are now undertaking a monumental attempt at defining that apparatus: they call it the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Shellenberger and Gutentag are two of the few journalists who not only take the reality of increased government censorship efforts seriously but also consider it a systemic, unified, and global threat, as opposed to a few discreet but regrettable extensions of U.S. political power.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams gave a completely unexpected Memorial Day speech denouncing socialism and Communism and bemoaning the lack of patriotism from the nation’s young.

Referencing Thomas Jefferson (a mistake, according to the radical left), Adams spoke of the famous “Tree of Liberty.”

“You water the tree of freedom with your blood,” Adams said. “We sit under the shade of that tree of freedom protected from the hot rays of socialism and communism and destruction that’s playing out across the globe.”

Adams referred to himself as a “thirty-eight percenter,” recalling a poll from last year that showed just 38% of Americans were “extremely proud” of the United States. He spoke proudly of our Pledge of Allegiance:

“Just as I start the day, every child should start the day with that hope and that true Pledge,” he said.

A 22-year veteran of the NYPD, Adams’s speech was not universally applauded — as you might expect.  New York’s Woke Left exploded.

[This is absolutely one of VDH’s superbly best, a 100% must-read]

The sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples. We’ll start with Reparations, and continue through Inequality before the Law, Woke Nullification of Federal Law, Rogue Federal Agencies, and Printing Money.

This can’t go on and yet it does. The longer it does, the more catastrophic will be the end.

Former President Donald Trump has the unique ability to launch a lawfare offensive against the media that could be so effective it would force a media transformation, an essential step to turning the country around.

Trump can prove the media knowingly engaged in spreading lies about collusion between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign and so much more. It seems malice would be awfully easy to prove as the evidence is in clear view. It would also be easy to show that all of the slander and libel caused material damage to Trump companies.

I tweeted about this last week as one of my most fervent dreams. And to my delight, a few days later, Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, filed a $3.78 billion lawsuit against the Washington Post in a Florida state court in Sarasota County, where Truth Social is based.

This is a pathway Trump companies can pursue whether he were to become president again or not. Trump is in the unique position to upend the media in a way that might radically reform how it functions in America.

Will it work? Put me in the camp of let’s find out.

This past weekend, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) reminded voters, and a skeptical press that has spent an inordinate amount of time writing his political obituary before he even launched his candidacy, that he not only possesses the promise and nimbleness needed to be a candidate for president but that he also has the staff and network needed to pull off just the right move to strike a blow against his rival, former President Donald Trump.

People underestimate DeSantis only at their own peril.

DeSantis and Trump were scheduled on Saturday (5/20) to be in Iowa, the state with the first-in-the-country contest for 2024, but Trump’s team canceled the event after the threat of a tornado warning. DeSantis took full advantage of his absence with an impromptu stop in the same area Trump was supposed to be, thus casting shade on the former president, who has spent months maligning DeSantis’s character.

“My better half and I have been able to be all over Iowa today, but before we went back to Florida, we wanted to come by and say hi to the people of Des Moines,” DeSantis said to a cheering and surprised crowd at the barbecue as he and his wife Casey stood on a picnic table outside. “So thank you all for coming out. It’s a beautiful night. It’s been a great day for us.”

DeSantis’ unscheduled stop speaks to the scope of the organization he already has in Iowa and its competency. Several Iowa Republicans said they were surprised that when Trump decided to cancel the rally, he didn’t try to do something else, even if it were on a smaller scale.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has warned of the potential of another Russian revolution akin to that of 1917 unless the strategy of the war in Ukraine is drastically altered.

Russia’s top mercenary leader said in a post on Telegram that the number of casualties suffered by common people in the war in Ukraine while elites in Moscow “shook their arses” could lead to widespread unrest and that the imposition of martial law could be required to prevent a full-blown revolution.

“We are in such a condition that we could effing lose Russia – that is the main problem… We need to impose martial law,” Prigozhin said according to a translation by the Reuters news agency.

“First the soldiers will stand up, and after that – their loved ones will rise up,” he continued. “There are already tens of thousands of them – relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands – we cannot avoid that.”

“This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution,” the Wagner boss warned, referencing the communist overthrow of the Romanov royal family by the communist uprising led by Vladimir Lenin a century ago.