Tennessee’s SB1 bans medical procedures on minors for the purpose of “enabling a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex” or “treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the parents of minors who claim to identify as the opposite sex and claim to have benefited from these procedures, sued to block the law, and the Biden administration joined the lawsuit on the ACLU’s side.

The plaintiffs claim that SB1 violates federal law by discriminating against minors who identify as transgender, denying to them the same treatments that would be allowed for minors who do not so identify.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld Tennessee’s law, finding that it doesn’t entail discrimination. The U.S. and the ACLU appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio—a male who says he identifies as female—argued the case before the court Wednesday, as did Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice.

Prelogar, Strangio, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, twisted the truth on “gender-affirming care” in at least five ways.

1. ‘Puberty blockers’ are reversible

“Critically, puberty blockers have no effect, in and of themselves, on fertility, so I don’t think that concern can justify the ban on puberty blockers, which is just pressing pause on someone’s endogenous puberty to give them more time to understand their identity,” Prelogar argued.

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved GnRH agonists, which stands for “Gonadatropin-releasing hormone agonists,” for the treatment of gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex) in children. GnRH agonists prevent the natural release of testosterone and estrogen that initiate puberty.

David Gortler, a pharmacologist and pharmacist who previously was a senior adviser to the FDA commissioner on policy and drug safety, previously told The Daily Signal that physicians developed GnRH agonists to help treat certain cancers that depend on estrogen or testosterone.

Endocrinologists—doctors who specialize in the hormone-regulating endocrine system—have testified to the harms these drugs can cause. Dr. Paul Hruz, an endocrinology researcher and clinician at Washington University School of Medicine, wrote that after “an extended period of pubertal suppression,” patients can’t “turn back the clock” and “reverse changes in the normal coordinated pattern of adolescent psychological development and puberty.”

Dr. Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist from the United Kingdom, explained that the effects of certain chemicals on the human brain aren’t well known, and that current science does not support “puberty blockers” for adolescents.

“As puberty is associated with very marked changes in the structure of the brain … the use of puberty blockers may have serious consequences for the development of the human brain,” Scott warned. Studies in sheep and young girls suggest that these drugs affect the size of the amygdala. Male sheep treated with the drugs showed “more risk-taking behaviors,” while treated female sheep “showed higher levels of anxiety and greater avoidance behavior.” Girls treated with the drug also showed “significant greater emotional reactivity” and “lower heart rates.” They also scored lower on IQ tests after taking the drugs.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864337895550583227

2. Suicidality

Strangio, the ACLU lawyer, claimed that it is “clearly established in the science and in the record” that “the medications in question reduce the risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, which are all indicators of potential suicide.” (Suicidality refers to the condition of contemplating suicide.) The lawyer admitted that there is no evidence “that this treatment reduces completed suicide” because “completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.”

Yet Strangio claimed that “there are multiple studies, long-term longitudinal studies, that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment.”

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864347214018920484

The evidence is not as clear-cut as Strangio suggested, however.

In one email on Jan. 25, 2022, Shannon Sullivan, clinical team leader at the FDA’s Division of General Endocrinology, noted that the agency’s Division of Metabolism and Endocrinology Products performed a “safety review of the GnRH agonist class in pediatric patients in 2016/2017.”

Sullivan noted that while the study did not find effects on bone density, “We did find increased risk of depression and suicidality, as well as increased seizure risk, and we issued [safety-related labeling changes].”

In other words, some studies show the exact opposite of Strangio’s claim—that GnRH agonists increase, rather than decrease, thoughts of suicide.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1818999085518487710

3. Puberty as Harmful

“Gender-affirming care” advocates repeatedly suggested that the natural process of puberty causes harm to people who identify with the gender opposite their biological sex.

“If you’re thinking about this from the standpoint of, ‘There’s no harm in just making them wait until they’re adults,’ I think you have to recognize that the effect of denying this care is to produce irreversible physical effects that are consistent with their birth sex, because they have to go through puberty before they turn 18,” Prelogar argued.

“So, essentially what this law is doing is saying we’re going to make all adolescents in this state develop the physical secondary sex characteristics consistent with their gender or their sex assigned at birth, even though that might significantly worsen gender dysphoria, increase the risk of suicide, and—I think, critically—make it much harder to live and be accepted in their gender identity as a result,” she said.

Prelogar noted that a male who goes through puberty will develop an Adam’s apple, and that may make it harder for that man to “pass” as female, thereby subjecting him to discrimination in the future.

“You have this population of adolescents, and there are documented very essential benefits for a large number of them, and maybe a small number that will regret this care just like with any other medical care,” she added.

Prelogar’s argument flips the natural course of biology on its head. She and others are suggesting that the natural process of puberty is somehow harmful and that it is better for males who say they identify as female to undergo a chemically induced artificial facsimile of the natural process than it is for them to develop naturally.

The evidence for benefits of this artificial process is flimsy, but the associated harms are manifold—and that’s the exact reason why Tennessee’s General Assembly voted to protect minors from it.

4. ‘The Same’ Medical Condition

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Jackson repeatedly suggested that the Tennessee law bans puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones (estrogen for boys and testosterone for girls, to make them appear like the opposite sex) for males who identify as female and females who identify as male, but not for males who identify as male and females who identify as female.

Sotomayor said that a boy struggling with precocious puberty—the condition of starting puberty too early—would take the same medication as a girl who identifies as male.

“The medical condition is the same, but you’re saying one sex is getting it and the other is not,” she added.

“We do not agree that the medical condition is the same,” Rice, the Tennessee solicitor general, responded. “We do not think that giving puberty blockers to a 6-year-old that has started precocious puberty is the same medical treatment” as giving them “to a minor who wants to transition.”

While the two patients would take the same drug, the intended purpose and practical effect would be different. Sotomayor and Jackson were conflating two very different conditions.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864355535811698868

5. ‘Gender Conformity’

Justice Elena Kagan argued that “one of the articulated purposes of this law is to essentially to encourage gender conformity and to discourage anything other than gender conformity.”

She cited the law’s text, which states that Tennessee has “a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty” and a similar interest “in protecting the integrity of the medical profession, including by prohibiting medical procedures that are harmful, unethical, immoral, experimental, or unsupported by high-quality or long-term studies, or that might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.”

She said that it “sounds to me that ‘we want boys to be boys and we want girls to be girls,’ and that’s an important purpose behind the law.”

Rice, representing Tennessee, noted that Kagan’s quotes come in the context of the state’s legislature attempting to prevent causing harm to minors. He noted studies in which minors’ mental health actually got worse after “gender-affirming care.”

“The legislature specifically noted those studies, so I think that statement was rooted in the notion that actually this is causing affirmative harm to minors that were undergoing the interventions, and that’s why they’re saying we don’t want these interventions that will cause minors to become disdainful of their sex,” he explained.

The law does not aim to set forth standards of masculinity to which boys must adhere, or standards of femininity that girls must follow. On the contrary, the transgender movement encourages boys who may have feminine traits to identify as girls and undergo medical interventions to alter their bodies. If any side is advocating conformity to gender standards, it is the transgender movement.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864359649689952658?

6. Comparison to Loving

Justice Jackson repeatedly compared SB1 to the Virginia law banning interracial marriage that the Supreme Court struck down in Loving v. Virginia (1967).

Prelogar agreed that both cases involve “overbroad generalizations of how we expect them to live and order their affairs,” such that “these laws disadvantage someone who falls outside the average description.”

“When we look at the structure of that law, it looks—you can’t do something that is inconsistent with your own characteristics—it’s sort of the same thing,” Jackson argued.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864342782350909713

“In [Loving v. Virginia], those same kinds of scientific arguments were made,” Jackson claimed again when questioning Strangio.

She repeated the comparison a third time when asking Rice, Tennessee’s solicitor general.

“There, the question of can you marry this other person depended on what your race was. You could marry the other person if it was the same, consistent with your race. You couldn’t if [it wasn’t],” Jackson said. “I take your law to be doing basically the same thing. You can take these blockers if doing so is consistent with your sex, but not if it’s inconsistent.”

“In this case, the only way that they can point to a sex-based line is to equate fundamentally different medical treatments,” Rice responded. “Giving testosterone to a boy with a deficiency is not the same treatment as giving it to a girl who has psychological distress with her body.”

Any argument about discrimination relies on confusion about the basic fact that males going through male puberty is healthy and in accordance with nature, while males going through a false, manufactured facsimile of female puberty is not.

https://twitter.com/Tyler2ONeil/status/1864358958124691921

Circling the wagons, Dr. Paul Offit, a current adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, lamely observes, “What they’re saying when they make these appointments is that we don’t trust the people who are there.”

You bet.

Trump and the public have every reason to distrust the current agency heads, after the repeated blunders, deceptions and coverups during COVID-19. Trump is appointing disrupters with the courage to challenge the status quo.

Like Dr. Marty Makary, nominated to head the Food and Drug Administration.

Makary’s credentials will make it impossible for the U.S. Senate to reject him. A Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor of public health, Makary was voted into the prestigious National Academy of Medicine, which is like the Hall of Fame for doctors.More important, if you’re in the hospital, you want Makary on your side.

Two decades ago, he declared war against the epidemic of medical errors killing as many as 100,000 patients a year: errors like patients being given the wrong dose of a medication, or the surgeon operating on the wrong body part, or a lethal germ invading the patients’ body to cause an infection.

The medical establishment was hush-hush about them. But not Makary. He argued for surgeons always taking a “timeout” in the operating room to look for errors. He also pioneered doctors using checklists, like pilots do, to ensure protocols are followed. My organization, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, considers Makary a hero.

In 2017, Makary went to bat for patients saddled with unfair medical debt. Even nonprofit hospitals were suing patients, garnishing wages and taking their homes. In many cases, hospitals had charged patients several times more than what insurance companies were charged for the same procedures. Makary called for an end to it.

When COVID-19 struck, Makary had the guts to speak out about mistakes he saw the federal health agencies making, like wasting scarce vaccine doses on people who already had natural immunity while other patients died waiting for a shot.

The federal health officials doubled down, ignoring actual evidence that disproved their insistence natural immunity was not as good as a shot. In fact, it’s many times more effective. The Biden administration pushed its social media lackeys to block his research from public view.

Makary told Congress “public health politicos” were to blame for numerous COVID-19 deaths.

He called for “using scientific evidence and not political badges and censorship in debating public health policy.”

But the left is still attacking scientists based on politics.

Left-wing Washington Post health reporter Lena Sun falsely claims that Trump’s team “is largely untested, possesses scant infectious-disease expertise” and would leave the nation in dire straits “when the next pandemic strikes.” Ridiculous.

Truth is, the public health elite marched in lock-step, muzzling critics even as the mistakes accumulated and 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. The U.S. per capita death rate far exceeded what other developed countries suffered.

To prepare for the next pandemic, the Trump administration must clean house and bring in bold scientists who challenge groupthink and demand evidence, which was totally lacking last time to support masking, 6-foot distancing, school closure and other recommendations.

When evidence is lacking, the rest of us become mere pawns, adhering to misguided medical recommendations that can cost us our lives.

Makary tells how an incorrect recommendation made by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2000—that children 3 and under as well as pregnant and lactating mothers should avoid all peanuts—resulted in a peanut allergy panic in the U.S.

Too embarrassed to admit they had no research on peanut allergies, the American Academy of Pediatrics made up that rule. Peanut allergies exploded, with the number of children rushed to emergency rooms with allergic reactions tripling from 2005 to 2014.

Research published in 2015 shows that exposing babies to peanuts actually reduces the risk of an allergy by 86%. But even the National Institutes of Health dithered for two years before giving parents a straight story.

The day Makary takes over at the FDA and brings his unflinching demand for evidence to Washington, D.C., will be a good day for science and for America.

The Daily Signal first reported in September that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee opened an investigation into the potential politicization of the population count and miscounts in 14 states.

The December Oversight hearing will review the Census Bureau’s 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey, or PES. The hearing will also look at the bureau’s preparations for the 2030 Census.

“The Census Bureau’s review of the 2020 Census revealed substantial miscounts and discrepancies tending to benefit Democrat-run states,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “Congress has a responsibility to conduct oversight of these massive errors to ensure they are not repeated in the 2030 census.”

U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos, an appointee of President Joe Biden, is set to testify at the hearing.

“Additionally, current integrity issues with the Census must be addressed,” Comer said.

He continued:

The Biden-Harris administration facilitated the worst border crisis in American history, allowing millions of illegal aliens to enter and reside in our country unlawfully. To ensure only U.S. citizens are counted for the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes, Congress must pass the Equal Representation Act to add a straightforward citizenship question to the Census. We look forward to hearing Director Santos’ testimony and ensuring the Census Bureau takes the necessary steps to deliver a fair and accurate 2030 census.

The 2020 Post-Enumeration Survey found statistically significant miscounts in the 2020 Census in 14 states.

The Biden administration’s Census Bureau revealed in May 2022 that it undercounted the Republican-leaning states of Arkansas by 5%, Florida by 3.4%, Mississippi by 4.11%, Tennessee by 4.78%, and Texas by 1.92%. The Census Bureau undercounted one Democratic-leaning state, Illinois, by 1.97%.

The Census Bureau overcounted Biden’s home state of Delaware by 5.45% as well as other Democratic-leaning states: Hawaii by 6.79%, Massachusetts by 2.24%, Minnesota by 3.84%, New York by 3.44%, and Rhode Island by 5%. It also overcounted two Republican-leaning states, Ohio by 1.49% and Utah by 2.59%.

WATCH: Retired Border Patrol agent J.J. Carrell tells members of Congress that the "United States federal government is the world's largest child sex trafficking organization in modern history." pic.twitter.com/0gVOAqpSDV

— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) November 19, 2024

Carrell served in the Border Patrol for 24 years, retiring as a deputy patrol agent in charge of the San Diego Sector before going on to author a book on the border crisis and film two documentaries on the topic.

“I state with complete certainty that [President Joe] Biden, [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas intentionally, strategically and purposely weaponized illegal immigration and use it as a tool to fundamentally transform America,” Carrell said during the joint hearing by the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement and Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, both subcommittees of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“Inside this invasion, the unspoken evil of child trafficking and more specifically, child sex trafficking has flourished,” he said.

Where Are the Missing Migrant Children?

In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that it does not know the location or status of more than 300,000 migrant children. Between fiscal year 2019 and 2023, 32,000 illegal alien minors did not appear for their immigration court hearing, and an additional 291,000 were never given an immigration court date.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.

Under current U.S. law, after being apprehended by Border Patrol or Customs and Border Protection, unaccompanied migrant children are released into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which in turn releases the child to a sponsor in the U.S.

For a decade, HHS has demonstrated a “record of losing children to sponsors who abuse, exploit, traffic, and harm children in unthinkable ways,” Tara Rodas told members of Congress during her testimony at Tuesday’s hearing, which was titled “Trafficked, Exploited, and Missing: Migrant Children Victims of the Biden-Harris Administration.”

As a government employee, Rodas was recruited in 2021 to help HHS with the growing number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the southern border. She soon discovered that the department’s unaccompanied migrant child program was allowing for the exploitation of children.

The names of the sponsors who take the children from the Office of Refugee Resettlement are run through the National Crime Information Center before a child is released. A sponsor can be a distant relative or have no blood relation to the child at all, opening the door for human traffickers to prey on minors, which, according to Rodas, has and continues to happen regularly.

“Migrant children are working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses and factories, and some may die today because they don’t have the knowledge or skills to do the job that their supposed to be doing, but their doing it because they need to repay debts to their smugglers and traffickers,” she said.

Tara Rodas, former deputy to the director of the Federal Case Management Team at HHS:

"Children, boys and girls, are being sold for sex. Just last month I spoke to a care provider in Florida who told me about cases of migrant children as young as 8 with sexually transmitted… pic.twitter.com/H9BbF3W6AT

— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) November 19, 2024

Rodas accused the U.S. of operating a “white glove delivery system” that is responsible for handing migrant children over to “MS-13, 18th Street Gang, Russian Balkans crime syndicates, and other unsavory characters.”

WATCH: Tara Rodas, former deputy to the director of the Federal Case Management Team at HHS:

"I'm very unclear as to why we're luring children to the United States to be the white glove delivery system of these children to known MS-13, 18th Street Gang, Russian Balkans crime… pic.twitter.com/je9J0OXmny

— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) November 19, 2024

In defense of HHS, Rodas pointed out that the department is “not an investigative or law enforcement agency. HHS simply does not have the knowledge, skills, ability, or the tradecraft to protect children from traffickers.”

Furthermore, child trafficking has become a highly sophisticated operation, according to Rodas, mirroring the “tactics and operations of terrorist organization.”

HHS Whistleblower Tara Rodas:

“HHS has a 10-year demonstrated record of losing children to sponsors who abuse, exploit, traffic, and harm children in unthinkable ways.” pic.twitter.com/GNn4C4q5N2

— Virginia Allen (@Virginia_Allen5) November 19, 2024

Solutions

Solutions to end the exploitation of migrant children, according to Rodas, include DNA testing for sponsors who claim to be a relative of the child, and prison time for sponsors who cannot produce the child that was given into their care.

“Let’s mobilize the full power of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to dismantle these criminal networks,” Rodas said, recommending that child trafficking activity should be elevated on the National Intelligence Priorities Framework and be designated a terrorist activity.

“We cannot be a nation that looks the other way,” Rodas said. “We have a moral imperative to care for children that the government takes into custody, and the time to act is now.”

The results are in, and on Nov. 5, Americans officially rejected the high prices and spiraling costs that defined much of the Biden-Harris administration—including the least affordable housing market in U.S. history.

Rather than being chastened by the national shellacking he, his vice president, and his party received, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is pursuing an audacious move that could throw the housing market into disarray and put homeownership even further out of reach for middle-class Americans.

In a high-profile lawsuit filed last month, the DOJ is seeking to crack down on a case of alleged home-appraisal bias in Colorado, but the lawsuit could set a worrisome new precedent for the relationship between mortgage lenders and appraisers. The consequences could be sweeping, and they may weigh most heavily on the black homeowners and aspiring homeowners who the DOJ is ironically trying to protect with this lawsuit.

The DOJ is alleging that an appraiser, Maksym Mykhailyna, undervalued a black woman’s Denver home while she was applying for a refinance. Undervaluation typically results in a higher interest rate and a lower loan amount.

The Biden administration has made cracking down on this kind of alleged discrimination a focus, and Vice President Kamala Harris has led the White House’s efforts. Yet, the DOJ’s case hardly proves the appraiser undervalued the home. Even more importantly, the DOJ fails to show that unlawful racial bias skewed the appraisal results or that this singular incident is indicative of systemic discrimination permeating the appraisal industry.

These crackdowns over an illusory problem have been repeatedly and correctly criticized. The administration is fundamentally trying to expand the federal government’s role in housing with little understanding of how meddling with the appraisal process would ultimately affect prices and homebuyers.

The DOJ lawsuit and much of the Biden administration’s efforts on this issue are misguided. In this latest effort, the Justice Department is going beyond holding an allegedly prejudiced appraiser accountable. Along with Mykhailyna, the DOJ also names Rocket Mortgage, the lender with whom the homeowner was seeking a refinancing, as a co-defendant.

The DOJ’s decision to go after the mortgage lender for the actions of an appraiser in this case not only contradicts federal law, but also risks reversing years of housing industry reforms that keep home prices in check.

Setting precedent to hold lenders accountable for the actions of independent appraisers would reintroduce the conflicts of interest that helped inflate home prices and created a housing bubble in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. A repeat of those circumstances would make homes even more expensive and put homeownership even further out of reach for many Americans.

Passed in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act explicitly bars mortgage lenders from influencing appraisers. The legislation established appraiser independence by mandating that lenders order appraisals through third-party companies called appraisal management companies. These companies are a critical degree of separation between lenders and appraisers that protect the housing industry from the conflicts of interest that led to the 2008 disaster. The DOJ’s efforts to punish the lender in the Colorado lawsuit threaten to erode the independence of appraisers.

Before 2008, there were no appraisal management companies, and appraisers were heavily dependent on the mortgage lenders that assigned them work. That conflict of interest led appraisers to overvalue homes in order to authorize bigger and more profitable loans for the mortgage lenders. That fueled the market bubble that eventually popped, tanking the global economy, nearly toppling the entire financial sector, and setting many American families back years.

If the Biden DOJ has its way, the U.S. could return to the pre-2008 housing industry. The potential for baseless lawsuits alleging undervaluation will incentivize both appraisers and lenders to overvalue properties—fueling yet more home price inflation and injecting more risk into the system.

Housing costs are already out of control. Minority communities across this country are disproportionately locked out of homeownership. Rather than pursuing splashy headlines for baseless lawsuits that would ultimately hurt Americans and further exacerbate prices, the government should be diminishing the footprint of the government-sponsored enterprises—namely, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—that have helped create a second housing bubble in the past 20 years.

The bottom line is that the DOJ’s misguided efforts here could wind up hurting all aspiring homeowners, including the very people of color who the Biden administration says that it is trying to stand up for.

Existing civil right laws already protect homeowners against racially biased appraisal practices. These laws should continue to be enforced. Regulators or legislators could task the appraisal management companies with keeping a more watchful eye over the appraisers and potential trends in their work. But the effort to burden the mortgage lenders with the responsibility of solving appraisal discrimination is not only misguided, it is deeply harmful to aspiring homeowners, the housing sector, and the financial industry.

The incoming Trump administration should immediately audit the Biden administration’s backward housing reforms and halt this lawsuit before it causes damage to the system. Woke, affirmative action policies are misguided and wind up hurting everyone. Voters want a return to simple, logic-driven policy, and this is one area to start with.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

According to a number of reports, President-elect Donald Trump will be creating a commission to review leaders in the military with the assumption that many of the top brass will be fired.

Trump will be using a “warrior board” of retired officers, The Hill reported, to review our current crop of three- and four-star officers and will weed out the ones the commission disapproves of.

That’s not all.

Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—an Army veteran who has been awarded two Bronze Stars, and who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—said in past interviews that it’s necessary to remove “woke” senior military officials who have left the U.S. armed forces in a sorry state.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and obviously you’ve got to bring in a new secretary of defense, but any general that was involved—general, admiral, whatever—that was involved in any of the DEI woke s—, has got to go,” Hegseth said in an early November interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show” podcast. DEI is shorthand for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Pete Hegseth is ready for day one as Defense Secretary.

'All the woke Generals must be fired immediately.'pic.twitter.com/ai9cqoImj4

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 13, 2024

Trump and Hegseth—the author of “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free” and “Modern Warriors: Real Stories from Real Heroes”—clearly intend to shake up the military at the top.

The Left, however, isn’t taking it well.

Legacy media is reporting on that development as if it’s some kind of ominous sign that Trump will “politicize” the military. They are even calling it a “purge.”

One left-wing podcaster, Fred Wellman, who includes “democracy advocate” in his X bio, even posted that removing generals is “truly fascist.”

This is truly fascist. The idea is they'll review and fire generals is chilling beyond measure and will damage our military for a generation. You don't make generals overnight. It takes decades. The good ones will leave early instead of waiting to be destroyed. (gift)…

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) November 12, 2024

Ah, yes, civilian control of the military, so fascist.

For a quick history lesson, a president’s removal of generals and other high-ranking military leaders—especially after years of relative “peace”—has often been a significant boon, not a hindrance, to the military.

Peacetime militaries—and I only use that phrase loosely to refer to our own era of near-constant, low-level asymmetrical conflicts—frequently calcify. Leaders who successfully navigate the bureaucratic treadmill to make it to the top ranks in those times are frequently not the best wartime leaders.

Militaries need to be shaken up from time to time.

In the War of 1812, many American military officers were holdovers from the American Revolution. Many had grown old and ineffective. The crucible of war allowed junior commanders like Winfield Scott to emerge as a brilliant young general who would prove instrumental in that war and future conflicts.

In the Civil War, there was a tremendous shake-up of the senior ranks on both sides.

Marginal officers like Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who was almost entirely overlooked at the Virginia Military Institute, proved himself to be one of the most astoundingly gifted military commanders once he had a chance to prove himself in battle.

Abraham Lincoln suffered through far too many mediocrities at the top before finding war winners like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Almost none of the top commanders at the beginning of the war ended up in the same place by the war’s end.

Right now, the United States clearly needs a shake-up at the Pentagon in the worst way.

The world is in turmoil, thanks in no small part to the Biden administration, and we are closer to seeing an actual peer-to-peer conflict than perhaps at any point since World War II.

Yet, many on the Left are hyperventilating about the move. Why? It’s a pretty good sign that they know they’ve made serious inroads into military institutions that are historically traditional and conservative. They don’t want to lose their grip on the military, just as they fear losing control of any other institution they dominate.

The primary issue, beyond typical military calcification, is that our current military leadership appears to be filled with those who have floated to the top amid the general woke-ification of American society and government.

It’s not Trump who will be “politicizing” the military; it’s the military itself that has been politicized. DEI, critical race theory, and other radical ideologies have been force-fed into military institutions, and the Biden administration was only too happy to accelerate that transformation.

They justified DEI by saying that it would create a better, more cohesive military and deepen the pool of recruits. That was the same unproven, bogus argument corporate America made when it went whole hog on “diversity” to the point of climbing aboard the discrimination bandwagon.

But much like the corporate DEI push—which proved a financial liability, rather than a boon—the military DEI advocacy has failed to “succeed” by even the most basic measures.

Nearly every branch of the military now faces a historic recruitment crisis, not to mention a surge in worrisome incidents that suggest a decline in competence and warfighting capability.

To make matters worse—and this is why Trump’s shake-up is almost certainly necessary—the military has failed to hold anyone at the top accountable for notable failures on the international stage.

Those failures have significantly weakened this country’s prestige and credibility abroad.

Most notably was the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. After that failure, nobody at the top got fired. The Biden administration and the military moved on, as if nothing had happened.

If we can’t handle our business against the Taliban, isn’t it worth questioning our ability to counter far greater potential adversaries, such as China?

To underscore the notion that the military has lost all accountability at the top, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin disappeared for nearly a week early this year to take care of a health issue before notifying the president.

If these are the sorts of “invaluable” leaders we may lose if Trump gets his way, it’s hard not to see the president-to-be’s “warrior board” as a net positive. This country should expect a lot better of its military.

This seems like an important moment for a “democratic” correction to a military that has seen a sharp decline in public trust.

Under Biden, the buck stopped nowhere. With Trump, maybe more capable leaders will have a chance to rise to the top and get our military back to focusing on preparedness and defending the American people.

Trump’s genius—in raising his fist amid an assassination attempt, donning the apron of a McDonald’s fry cook, and riding shotgun in a trash truck—carried the day. However, the Left’s slings and arrows against the former president also helped propel him to victory by exposing how cynical and conniving his opponents were.

The Left committed at least six massive political miscalculations that also amount to transgressions against America’s political order. These moves helped Trump win, but they also exposed the forces he will face in a second term.

1. The Lawfare

Left-leaning prosecutors brought multiple civil and criminal cases against Trump, most of which revved into high gear last year after he announced in November 2022 that he would run for president again in 2024.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, campaigned on the prospect of prosecuting Trump, and her office began investigating the Trump Organization in early 2019. She sued in September 2022, alleging that Trump had violated the law by exaggerating his net worth, though none of his business partners claimed to be victimized by this alleged exaggeration.

Presiding Judge Arthur Engoron demanded Trump and his companies fork over more than $350 million to the state in February. Engoron initially ordered Trump to post $454 million bond, but an appeals court agreed to lower the amount to $175 million.

In March 2023, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to pay pornography star Stephanie Clifford, known by her stage name Stormy Daniels, “hush money” after the 2016 election. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney at the time, gave Clifford $130,000 in October 2016, and Trump reimbursed Cohen in a series of payments after Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017.

On May 30, a jury convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts. His sentencing hearing has been scheduled for Nov. 26, though the former president has appealed the verdict in light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, argued that Trump had interfered in the 2016 election by altering business records after the election.

Improperly appointed special counsel Jack Smith led an investigation into Trump for alleged lawbreaking regarding his challenging the 2020 presidential election results and inspiring the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

In August 2023, a grand jury approved an indictment against Trump. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan scheduled a trial to begin March 4, but Trump appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court ruled July 1 that the president has “absolute” immunity from charges stemming from “core constitutional powers” and “presumptive immunity” for all other official acts.

Smith launched another case against Trump regarding his alleged improper retention of classified documents after his presidency ended Jan. 20, 2021. Smith, whom President Joe Biden appointed in November 2022, charged Trump with 40 felonies in the case. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional.

Smith is reportedly wrapping up both prosecutions in the wake of Trump’s election victory.

Biden later confessed that he had improperly retained classified documents from his years as vice president and U.S. senator, yet he faced no charges. Special counsel Robert Hur investigated Biden and interviewed him, ultimately declining to bring charges in part because a jury would find Biden sympathetic as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” made it less likely he intentionally violated the law.

Republicans demanded that the Justice Department release the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur, since the special counsel’s report cast grave doubts on the president’s ability to carry out his duties.

Each of these legal cases arguably represented a political attack on Trump through the legal system, often on trumped-up charges. Trump became the first former president convicted of a felony, yet the partisan nature of these attacks led Americans to suspect that the Left was abusing the system to prosecute its top enemy. The lawfare almost certainly backfired, as well it should have.

2. The Ballot Challenges

In a similarly egregious political attack, activists and Democratic officials moved to strike Trump from state ballots on the claim that he had incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Supreme Court definitively (and unanimously) ended this argument in March, ruling that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution does not disqualify Trump from appearing on ballots. (Trump had never been charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it.)

At a time when Democrats were running as the “party of democracy” and warning that Trump would end democracy, they also sought to disqualify the former president at the outset. This effort also backfired.

3. The Nazi Comparisons

Throughout this election cycle, Biden, Harris, and others on the left have suggested that Trump represented a threat to democracy. They condemned him as racist and authoritarian. They continued to do so even after he faced multiple assassination attempts.

Yet the most absurd moment arguably came toward the end of the campaign, when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, noted that Trump would hold a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. On the day of that rally, Walz said, “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square garden.”

Walz was straining to connect Trump’s rally to an American Nazi Party rally in February 1939. Not only was there a gap of more than 80 years between the two rallies, but Madison Square Garden’s location physically moved in both 1926 and 1968. The Madison Square Garden that hosted the pro-Nazi rally is not even the same building that hosted Trump.

Furthermore, Madison Square Garden hosted multiple Democratic Party events, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last 1936 campaign speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1976, 1980, and 1992.

The idea that Trump echoed Nazis simply by choosing a venue—which had been twice rebuilt since the 1939 event—is ludicrous on its face.

IT'S REAL: MSNBC did indeed include the chyron "TRUMP'S MSG RALLY COMES 85 YEARS AFTER PRO-NAZI RALLY AT FAMED ARENA."

This echoes Tim Walz's attack on Trump, citing the rally. Yes, pro-Nazi Americans rallied at Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Does this taint… pic.twitter.com/rg2hIvWRQn

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 28, 2024

4. Hiding Biden’s Decline

The fact that Biden was no spring chicken—even in 2019 and 2020—should not be lost on anyone, but for most of the 2024 presidential election, the White House, the legacy media, and the Democratic establishment brushed off concerns about the sitting president’s declining mental acuity.

None other than Kamala Harris repeatedly insisted that Biden was A-OK.

“Our president is in good shape, in good health, and is ready to lead in our second term,” Harris said in February. She praised him as “vibrant.”

WATCH: Over 6 minutes of Kamala Harris covering up Joe Biden's cognitive decline.

For years, she said Biden is "very bold and vibrant" and is "tireless in terms of working." Kamala claimed Biden "is gonna be fine," and said he "is in good shape, in good health."

Kamala LIED. pic.twitter.com/d2domPIUOA

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 7, 2024

Despite his disastrous performance in the June 27 debate with Trump, Biden repeatedly insisted he would remain in the race. Only after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama leaked that they had met with Biden, pressuring him to withdraw, did the president finally announce he would leave the race and back his vice president.

Early Wednesday morning, CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper tried to bring up any counties where Harris was “outperforming Biden in 2020,” but not one county showed the vice president winning 3% or more votes than Biden did four years before.

NOT. ONE. COUNTY.

Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper bring up CNN's interactive map showing if there was any county in the country where Kamala Harris outperformed Joe Biden by 3% or more.

Were the Democrats smart to swap out Biden at the last moment for Kamala Harris? pic.twitter.com/kJYm0gEQZp

— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) November 6, 2024

5. The Kamala Switcheroo

Speaking of Kamala Harris, who, exactly, is she? That’s not a rhetorical question.

There’s tough-on-crime prosecutor Kamala, whom she sometimes plays on TV. There’s radical-Left activist Kamala, who briefly got a voting record score to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Then there’s cackling Kamala trying to be bubbly, as she briefly was for the “joy” and “vibes” election the legacy media tried to foist on Americans when the Democratic elites propped Harris up as the savior early in her brief campaign.

Finally, there was angry, scolding, Trump-is-a-fascist Kamala, who also wiggled out of taking any policy position that would differentiate her from the sitting president while she was running a “change” election.

Is it any wonder Kamala Harris never won a primary in the 2020 Democratic contest?

That’s right—the last-minute switcheroo that was going to “save democracy” from Donald Trump involved someone who didn’t win a single Democratic primary in 2020 or 2024. It involved someone who claimed she wasn’t Joe Biden but never created any daylight between her policies and those of Joe Biden.

Worse, it involved a candidate who branded her opponent a fascist when she herself had the record of trying to prosecute pro-life journalists, demanding donor information from conservative nonprofits, and demonizing fellow Americans for disagreeing with her radical stance on abortion.

Democrats chose a nominee who had been tasked with solving the crisis over illegal immigration, even though it got worse on her watch. They chose a nominee whose answer to every question was “I grew up in a middle-class family.” They chose the garden goddess of word salads, whose grand achievement was explaining that Ukraine is a country in Europe.

KAMALA: “Ukraine is a country in Europe.

It exists next to another country called Russia.

Russia is a bigger country.”

Glad we cleared that up.

Source: Morning Hustle pic.twitter.com/IEXrjUJkgj

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 24, 2024

What does Harris’ duplicity have to do with her awkwardness and her lack of primary victories? Just this: Americans knew she was being foisted upon them under false pretenses, and Tuesday’s election results suggest that they really didn’t like that.

The Biden-Harris switcheroo suggested that the real power behind the administrative state wasn’t the man sitting behind the Resolute Desk but a shadowy network of elites pulling the strings behind the scenes. Perhaps someone should write a book about that. (My book on this exact subject, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” is available for pre-order now and releases on Jan. 21, 2024.)

6. The Closing Argument

After all this, Harris delivered a “closing argument” packed with lies and predicated on demonizing her opponent.

Yet the legacy media seized on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s remark at Trump’s Madison Square Garden event that Puerto Rico was an “island of garbage,” and Biden revealed his disdain for Trump’s supporters by responding: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

By calling Americans who oppose his chosen successor “garbage,” the sitting president of the United States sent a clear and chilling message—even if Biden attempted to clarify it later.

Trump, always the showman, defused the insult with his comedic charm. He donned the orange and yellow reflective vest of a garbageman and sat in the front of a garbage truck. He spoke about it at his rallies, remarking that the safety vest made him look thinner.

On the one hand, Americans saw a Democratic puppet who couldn’t present a genuine personality, and on the other hand, they saw a man who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty (metaphorically, of course) by working at McDonald’s and getting into a garbage truck.

The idea that this man—who faced unprecedented criminal charges, disgusting attempts to remove him from the ballot, and assassination attempts—represented the true threat to democracy just could not stand.

Rather, the entire campaign revealed the exact opposite. Only one political party tried to disqualify its opponent from the very beginning of the race. Only one party fanned the flames of hatred despite assassination attempts against its target. Only one struggled desperately to change the playing field at the last minute after lying to the American people the whole time.

Trump won this election, despite every norm the Left broke to try to take him down.

Now, he has to make sure his victory sends the appropriate message: that the elites can’t force their way on the American people. That struggle has just begun.

Final polling averages suggest that Trump has the advantage—and the momentum—heading into Election Day. Real Clear Polling has Trump edging out Harris by 0.1% in national polling and up in enough swing states to pass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

There has not been an election-altering October surprise—no Hunter Biden laptop, no missing emails. If there was one, however, it was President Joe Biden calling Trump supporters garbage.

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something,” the president said during a virtual event, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The comments outraged Trump’s supporters, just as Hillary Clinton’s comment calling them “deplorables” did in 2016. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign took the comments in stride. Following Biden’s comments, the former president held a press conference from the cockpit of a garbage truck with full campaign branding on the side.

Trump has completely derailed my evening. I have spent 90 minutes laughing at this man’s genius.

Again, hate em if ya want, but our 45th president just showed up in a garbage truck and is now speaking at his rally in an orange garbage man vest. I can’t even. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/FN1oFORjyJ

— Lindsay In South Carolina (@LindsayJPitcher) October 30, 2024

The former president even did a rally wearing a sanitation worker’s high-visibility vest after the stunt.

Left-wing media outlets have been after Trump since his first run for office in 2016.

The Media Research Center released findings on Oct. 28 that showed Trump’s media coverage was 85% negative compared to Harris’s 78% positive coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news broadcasts for the 2024 presidential race. Media Research Center analysts reviewed 660 stories about the presidential election on the news channels from July 21, the day Biden ended his candidacy, to Oct. 25.

In the 2016 presidential race, both Trump and Clinton received high amounts of negative coverage, with 91% negative for Trump and 79% negative for Clinton. In the coverage for the 2020 race, Trump received 92% negative coverage and Biden received 66% positive coverage.

Nevertheless, media bias has not prevented Trump from broadening his support.

Standing room only at Vance rally in Holland, Michigan, with a long line out the door! pic.twitter.com/xAatpL6ARe

— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024

Trump, with a bold alternative media strategy, has brought together a motley crew of voices across the political spectrum, such as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entrepreneur Elon Musk, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, R-Hawaii.

During a recent interview on Fox News, Gabbard said she asks people in the audience to raise their hand if they are a Democrat or a former Democrat whenever she speaks at a Trump event.

“In almost every event, somewhere between 35-50% of the room will raise their hand,” she said in the Oct. 29 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend.

What excited Gabbard even more was the reaction of Trump supporters to those whose hands were raised. Trump supporters “stood up and cheered and welcomed them [Democrats and former Democrats] and just surrounded them, really, with love and kindness.”

Gabbard said a lot of people shared their experiences with her after the event.

“I had so many people come up to me at the end of that saying, ‘I came in here afraid. I’ve never been to a political rally before. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a Democrat, lifelong Democrat, never voted before.’ Different variations of this, but each walking out saying, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump because of what I experienced here today,’” Gabbard said.

American voters may have come to Trump rallies for the fun, but Trump needs them to stay for Election Day to win.

Both Democrats and Republicans brought lawsuits.

Some matters already have been settled. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court sided last week with Virginia by allowing the state to remove the names of 1,600 noncitizens from the voter rolls. And in Pennsylvania, Republicans successfully sued to extend early voting hours.

However, courts tossed other election cases on procedural grounds or cases remain unsettled and could prompt arguments in close elections.

Here are eight issues to look out for, both on Election Day and after.

1. Voter Registration in Pennsylvania

At least four jurisdictions in Pennsylvania are investigating potential voter registration fraud.

State prosecutors in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County are investigating two batches of about 2,500 voter registration forms that may include several hundred fraudulent forms.

As of Monday afternoon, the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office had determined that 17% of the forms were fraudulent. Another 57% were determined to be legitimate, WPMT-TV (Fox 43) reported. The rest were still being investigated.

York County officials also are investigating potential voter registration fraud. Of a batch of 3,087 forms, about 24% were declined after being found to be duplicate requests.

York County also is reviewing challenges to 350 overseas mail-in ballots.

And the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office last week identified fraudulent voter registration forms. A specific number wasn’t given and the investigation continues, the Pocono Record reported.

Berks County also referred two potential voter registration violations for investigation.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, said attempts to submit fraudulent voter registration forms in the four counties “have been defeated.” Henry said her office is working with local law enforcement.

“While we will not be divulging sensitive information about these investigations, we want to clarify that the investigations regard voter registration forms, not ballots,” Henry said in a public statement, adding later: “The investigations are ongoing, and offenders who perpetrated acts of fraud will be held accountable under the law.”

2. Undelivered, Duplicate Ballots

In Erie County, Pennsylvania, Democrats sued over a debacle concerning absentee ballots.

Judge David Ridge ruled Friday that Erie County must offer a new set of absentee ballots to almost 20,000 voters who didn’t receive them. The state judge also said the county would have to stay open longer office hours until Election Day.

The vendor wasn’t able to confirm the status of between 13,000 and 17,000 absentee ballots requested by Erie County residents before the deadline, USA Today reported. In addition, 1,200 county residents who said they would be out of town requested absentee ballots. On top of that, 365 duplicate ballots were sent to voters.

3. Overseas Mail Ballots

Republicans lost three federal lawsuits regarding a law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which governs how Americans living overseas can vote in federal elections.

The GOP lawsuits over UOCAVA focused largely on nonmilitary overseas voters, many of whom indicated no intention to return to the United States.

Six Republican members of the U.S. House sued Pennsylvania over the state’s counting procedures. The GOP lawmakers’ complaint says that about 15,000 nonmilitary American voters living abroad but casting ballots in Pennsylvania elections should have to provide the same personal identification as Pennsylvania residents.

But U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner determined last Tuesday—one week before Election Day—that an injunction could “upend the commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters.”

Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Sima Patel ruled against the Republican National Committee’s challenge to rules in the U.S. law. The RNC challenge was based on nonresidents’ dependents who live abroad voting in state elections. Patel ruled that the GOP lawsuit was an attempt to “disenfranchise” voters.

Similarly, North Carolina Superior Court Judge John Smith ruled that the RNC challenge “presented no substantial evidence” of fraudulent voting.

4. 218,000 Arizona Voters With No Proof of Citizenship

Arizona state Judge Scott Blaney last week ordered the office of Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, to release the names of voters who were misclassified as not being required to show proof of U.S. citizenship, The Associated Press reported.

Fontes initially said that the number of misclassified voters was thought to be 98,000 registered voters who lacked proof of citizenship and thus could not vote in state and local elections. However, a revised estimate put the number more than twice as high, at 218,000 voters who lacked proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

Arizona state officials contend that a coding glitch caused the problem. Arizona law requires proof of U.S. citizenship for voting in state and local elections, but not in federal elections. The concern is that the 218,000 voters without proof of citizenship could vote in state and local elections because of the glitch.

Arizona state law requires proof of citizenship for voting only in state and local elections, not federal elections such as for president or Congress. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 prevents a state from imposing proof-of-citizenship requirements for federal elections.

So, Arizona voters lacking proof of citizenship would be able to vote in the presidential election, just as in any other state. However, these voters normally would not be allowed to vote in state and local elections in Arizona.

The total of 218,000 voters without proof of citizenship—who may vote in federal elections but not state elections—prompts concerns because federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting or registering to vote.

The America First Legal Foundation sued for the voter registration records.

Blarney, in his ruling, rejected Arizona’s contention that the information would provoke violence. He gave Fontes a deadline of noon Monday to release the names of the 98,000 misclassified voters.

5. Georgia Ballot Centers

The Trump campaign and the RNC sent letters over the weekend to county ballot processing centers, asserting the reopening of the offices was illegal.

The letters called for sequestering the ballots received after Nov. 1, Georgia’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots. The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit as well.

The RNC contends that the Democrat counties of Chatham, Clark, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett accepted Saturday in violation of Georgia law.

6. Nevada Postmarks

The Nevada Supreme Court last week determined that mail ballots that arrive three days after Election Day with no postmark will still be counted.

Nevada uses universal mail-in voting.

The state’s highest court rejected a challenge brought by the Republican National Committee, which argued that when a ballot lacks a postmark it’s difficult to know whether it really was sent before Election Day.

The court also determined that ballots with smudges and indecipherable writing would be counted.

7. Iowa and Noncitizen Voting

Although the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Justice Department lawsuit against Virginia for removing the names of 1,600 noncitizens from the voter rolls, the United Latin American Citizens of Iowa sued Iowa’s Republican secretary of state, Paul Pate, and election officials from five counties over removal of noncitizens’ names.

Pate sent a list of 2,176 registered voters who were suspected noncitizens to local election officials in Iowa.

The plaintiffs filed their complaint Oct. 30. On Sunday, an Iowa judge denied the motion for a temporary restraining order or temporary injunction, and determined that the voter registrations would not be restored before Election Day.

The judge determined, however, that any individual would be allowed to cast a provisional ballot.

8. Unsent Mail Ballots in Georgia

In this case, the Democratic National Committee sued Cobb County, Georgia, alleging that the county’s Board of Elections failed to send mail-in ballots to more than 3,000 voters who requested the forms.

Georgia law requires elections offices to send ballots within three days of receiving a request. The deadline to receive a request was Oct. 25.

The elections board announced it didn’t get all ballots sent on time, and planned to send some by express shipping. However, Democrats, in their complaint in state court, contend that wasn’t sufficient since that’s not enough time to ensure ballots would be counted.

Democrats are suing to extend the deadline to receive ballots from Nov. 5 to Nov. 8.

Americans are tired of talking heads and the opinions of editorialists masquerading as journalists. But this should not be confused with declining interest in news or politics; viewers are simply moving to channels where they can get an unfiltered view of the candidates from personalities they trust.

If there is one clear lesson from the 2024 election cycle, it’s that candidates for public office must be prepared to engage in this new media landscape to stay competitive, especially on long-form podcasts.

The last time we had a shift this significant was 1960, when America saw the first televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The Kennedy-Nixon debate underscored the power of television to shape public perception.

Remember, past is prologue. Take, for example, Donald Trump’s appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Already, it’s racked up about 45 million views—just on YouTube alone. Trump’s interview with Theo Von received 14 million views. For her part, Kamala Harris’ appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast received 733,000 views and she received 665,000 views on the “All the Smoke” podcast.

While traditional media audiences are shrinking, these appearances have outperformed the average audiences of these podcasts oftentimes 10 to 1. Remarkably, the candidates’ episodes are even outpacing episodes featuring internationally known Hollywood celebrities.

Voters are hungry to hear from the candidates on an unfiltered, authentic platform, and podcasts are filling that need.

This shift is redefining how viable candidates will approach media going forward. Those who want to succeed in politics but are afraid, or unable, to allow the public a view into who they really are going to have a ceiling on their career if they don’t do long-form interviews.

Political campaigns are going to change in two ways due to this dynamic.

1. Candidates need to get comfortable in their own skin, open up and answer personal questions about heartache, addiction, and what makes their spouse smile. This open, honest, and unvarnished content mirrors what the public is receiving in their social media feeds already, so it makes sense that they are demanding the same transparency from their political leaders.
2. It’s going to transform the way political professionals engage with the electorate. According to GWI, a consumer research company, the “typical” internet user spends almost 2.5 hours each day using social media platforms, equating to more than one-third of their total time online. As a result, campaign resources should shift to talking to the electorate where they are spending their time, which is on their phone. That is where people are getting their news, listening to podcasts, vegging out, and forming opinions about who they will vote for.

The reason these podcasters and creators carry so much influence is because of the community and trust they build with their audience. As James Clear, author of The New York Times bestseller of “Atomic Habits,” says about changing opinions, “Facts don’t change our minds. Friendship does.”

This election year, I was part of an effort that enlisted thousands of podcasters and social media personalities to encourage unregistered and low propensity voters to engage in the political process. Content creators in coordination with Vote4America delivered billions of impressions to tens of millions of voters. The posts calling on people to engage in the election significantly overperformed the average post of the creator, much like the success of the Trump and Harris podcast appearances.

We won’t know the full effect of all this content until all the votes are counted, but we can already see that 8.5% of all early votes are being cast by previously eligible first-time voters, meaning they are of age to have voted in past elections but decided not to.

The authenticity and trust of these podcasters and content creators is clearly having an effect on voter behavior.

What Jeff Bezos got wrong was his slight at podcasts as “unresearched.” The public clearly disagrees.

Americans are choosing podcasts over Bezos’ newspaper as their trusted source of news and information. Traditional media and candidates for office now must grapple with the new expectations of the electorate: unfiltered, unedited, authentic content.