“Free Speech” Haven Facebook Blocking Internal Criticism of Trump Ally

Within hours of announcing Meta’s policy changes to return the company to its “roots of free expression,” the company has already begun censoring criticism from its own employees, 404 Media reported.

Meta’s “Internal Community Relations team” deleted several posts made by employees criticizing the recent decision to add Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White—a close ally of Donald Trump—to Meta’s board of directors, the outlet revealed Tuesday.

While the response from employees was mixed overall, several were outspoken about their disappointment. While one joked that UFC fighter Connor McGregor would be next to join the company, another employee remarked that it was “kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape,” referring to White and McGregor, respectively.

“I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I’m on another planet,” wrote a third employee.

Several posts criticizing White were supposedly deleted because they had violated the “Community Engagement Expectations,” or CEE, rules that govern the internal communications between employees.

“I’m posting a comment here with a reminder about the CEE, as multiple comments have been flagged by the community for review,” wrote one member of the Internal Community Relations team in a thread, which explained why posts had been deleted. “It’s important that we maintain a respectful work environment where people can do their best work. We need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community—including members of our Board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE.”

Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that posts that were critical but did not violate the CEE had not been taken down. Clayton emphasized that the internal and external moderation policies were completely separate.

The censorship feels particularly hypocritical considering that Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the company’s platforms would no longer use third-party fact-checking services, in favor of community notes. They would also dial back content filters, allow more discussion around topics such as gender and immigration, and raise the threshold for removing a post—all changes that directly benefit right-wing speech.

Meta’s policy chief said that the announcement was inspired by Trump’s return to the White House, and even Trump speculated that the decision had “probably” been in response to threats he made against Zuckerberg.

White’s installation at the top of a major social media company signals a big shift in corporations toward appeasing both Trump specifically and the larger manosphere in general.

Donald Trump’s acolytes in the House of Representatives are so jazzed about his forthcoming administration that they’re practically handing him the reins to resume manifest destiny.

In a since-deleted tweet posted on Wednesday, the official account for the House GOP challenged the patriotism of the president-elect’s foreign policy detractors, claiming that denying Trump’s “big dreams” for the country was “un-American.”

“Our country was built by warriors and explorers,” the official House GOP wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “We tamed the West, won two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon.

“President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of big dreams,” they wrote.

The message was circulated alongside the New York Post’s front page, which featured a caricature of Trump standing in front of a map of the Western hemisphere with America’s geographical neighbors rebranded as part of America.

Trump has escalated a laughless joke in recent weeks that Canada and Greenland should be absorbed into the United States, making them states under the American banner. But the bully behavior ends where foreign countries begin to take the threat seriously: Trump has also advanced the idea that the U.S. should take the Panama Canal from Panama. That alone has prompted the leader of the Panama Canal Authority to warn that Trump’s rhetoric “will lead to chaos.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales sternly rebutted Trump’s claim that China was getting preferential rates to use the vital trade route.

“Rules are rules and there are no exceptions,” Vásquez Morales said. “We cannot discriminate for the Chinese, or the Americans, or anyone else. This will violate the neutrality treaty, international law and it will lead to chaos.”

Donald Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland to the United States seems to have an unlikely supporter: Democratic Senator John Fetterman.

Fetterman appeared on Fox News on Tuesday with Republican Senator Katie Britt, and when the topic of Greenland came up, Fetterman didn’t dismiss the idea.

“There’s a lot of talk about Greenland, for example, and … there’s a lot of freak-outs, and, of course, I would never support taking it by force,” Fetterman said. He added that discussing the territory’s annexation would be a “responsible conversation,” including “just buying it out.”

“If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase?” Fetterman said.

Trump will probably be very happy with Fetterman’s words. The president-elect keeps pushing half-baked plans of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal zone, and his son even visited Greenland on Tuesday. But the Danish-controlled territory and Denmark’s leaders say that the island isn’t for sale, and French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot warned Wednesday that the European Union would not tolerate an attack on its “sovereign borders.”

Fetterman’s reaction to Trump’s idea seems to be part of a pattern by the Pennsylvania senator, who has boasted about shifting away from progressive politics for more than a year. Pennsylvania’s only Democratic senator even bragged that brain damage resulting from his near-fatal stroke has allowed him to “say the things that I have to really believe in and not be afraid of if there’s any kind of blowback.”

If Trump actively pursues annexing Greenland, or any other territory, after he is sworn in, there certainly will be blowback, both in the U.S. and abroad. What will Fetterman and other Democrats who have chosen to appease Trump say then?

Republicans are using the devastating California wildfires as an excuse to score cheap political points against Democrats and Governor Gavin Newsom, rather than focusing on providing sorely needed assistance.

Multiple wildfires are burning through Los Angeles County, killing two people and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. President-elect Trump called the fires “virtually apocalyptic.”

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration.… He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this.”

Elon Musk retweeted a conservative account attacking Newsom, while presidential envoy Richard Grenell tweeted, “The far left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground. Stop voting for people who won’t use common sense water management and forest policies. I’m pissed off. You should be, too.”

Governor Newsom struck back on Tuesday. “My message to the incoming administration—and I’m not here to play any politics—is please don’t play any politics,” he said. “There’s a time and place for that.… The precious moments we have to evacuate, we don’t have any time for that mishegoss.”

There’s a lot of finger pointing coming from a party that has ignored climate change for decades while continuing to invest in the very fossil fuel industry that is helping warm our climate and heavily influencing this irregular weather pattern in the process.

Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested Tuesday that the Department of Justice scale back the president’s power to use the U.S. military domestically.

In a letter on behalf of the committee Democrats, Durbin urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to “withdraw certain legal opinions by The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relating to the allocation of war powers and foreign relations powers between Congress and the president.

“I request that the Department of Justice publicly release opinions and manuals pertaining to the domestic use of the U.S. military,” Durbin wrote. “For decades, OLC has issued guidance on the circumstances in which the President may deploy the military within the United States, as well as what servicemembers may do when so deployed.

“The American people have a right to know how the Executive Branch interprets the President’s constitutional and statutory authority to use the military domestically,” Durbin continued. “The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations.”

In a post on X, the committee Democrats alleged that there were five “flawed opinions” that had “run afoul of Congress’s critical check on presidential war powers” that needed to be rescinded.

It seems that Durbin and Senate Democrats are hoping to rein in Trump’s military powers ahead of his return to the White House later this month. Trump has previously claimed he will use the military to conduct sweeping raids as part of his mass deportation scheme. He has also threatened to turn the U.S. military against his political enemies and even foreign allies.

During a rambling press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump threatened that “all hell will break out” if hostages held by Hamas in Gaza aren’t released by his inauguration on January 20.

It’s a threat Trump has repeatedly made since early December, and he did not elaborate on what it means Tuesday, instead saying, “It will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.” Last month, he promised “hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released by his inauguration, seemingly threatening U.S. military action but making no mention of a Gaza ceasefire as a prerequisite.

If the “hell” Trump is promising is military action, it would inflame the Middle East further and likely set off a regional conflict that already includes Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. In a phone call last month, Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, and reiterated the threat.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has remarked that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza, basically endorsing the country’s yearlong brutal military assault that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and war crimes charges. What would further “hell” visited upon Gaza look like to a territory that has been reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of deaths?

The civilian death toll in Gaza has only continued to climb since then, with thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths caused by the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. In October, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

President Biden will leave office refusing to consider any action against Israel, instead planning an $8 billion arms sale to the country on his way out. Trump’s latest words confirm that his Israel-Palestine policy won’t be any better and in fact might exacerbate the ongoing genocide even further.

Los Angeles authorities have evacuated some 30,000 people as of Wednesday, as flames tear through the Pacific Palisades, threatening more than 10,000 homes. And even though the fires are literally in its own backyard, Los Angeles hasn’t exactly prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.

The city’s 2024–2025 budget slashed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.

Exactly why the fire department was deprioritized amid escalating wildfire seasons is unclear, but the unfortunate budget decision comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing the heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction on the “existential” threat.

“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.

But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion.

Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

Donald Trump is strongly considering classifying Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, CNN reported Wednesday. This designation would make it easier to use military force against them.  

The president-elect first floated this idea in 2019, but backed off after receiving backlash from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his own Justice Department officials. 

“Basically, you take the gloves off, meaning it can be anywhere from having joint operations where you’re physically doing things or where you’re actively targeting, maybe once again through finances, you’re turning loose [the] DOJ and FBI,” Republican Representative Tony Gonzales said of the reintroduced idea. 

Gonzalez is right to a degree: Treating cartels as terrorist organizations would increase the angles of attack for the federal government, potentially creating a larger pool of defendants. But the brunt of this change would fall unjustly on immigrants. 

The designation would make it much harder for immigrants and asylum-seekers to gain access to the U.S. given the proximity they often have to exploitative cartel activity. Many immigrants travel through cartel territory on their way to the southern border, and often have to pay them a toll to do so. This would cause immigrants to violate a statute surrounding providing funds to terrorist organizations. 

If this comes to fruition, Trump and border czar Tom Homan would be making an already hostile situation even more contentious.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is so excited for Donald Trump to keep chasing the Panama Canal that he’s now imagining his own fantastical version of events where the U.S. uses the waterway to wage war on China.

During an interview on Fox Business Tuesday, Tuberville got a little creative when cheerleading Trump’s outlandish push to take control of the trade route.

“We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back, we’ve got to do something because if we’re gonna happen to go to war with China over Taiwan, and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten thousand miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China,” Tuberville said.

While Trump was once friendly with Taiwan, he criticized it on the campaign trail. The president-elect argued that the island should have to pay the U.S. for protection, and accused it of stealing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Trump also promised several times on the campaign trail that his administration would be a peaceful one, so his dumbest admiral airing his ideas about going to war seems at odds with that phony foreign policy.

Trump’s threat to claim the Panama Canal comes as he has upped the ante on several expansionist musings, including using economic forces to turn Canada into the fifty-first state and buying Greenland from Denmark.

France is warning Donald Trump against attempting to annex Greenland, saying that the European Union would not “let other nations in the world—whoever they might be—attack its sovereign borders.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the statement to public radio broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday, adding that he doesn’t expect Trump to invade the autonomous Danish territory. However, Barrot added that the world is witnessing a “return of the law of the strongest.”

Barrot’s words came after Trump refused to rule out using military force to retake Greenland and the Panama Canal in a rambling press conference on Tuesday. His son Donald Jr. also visited Greenland Tuesday in what appeared to be an attempt to legitimize the president-elect’s plans. The leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have said the territory is not for sale.

Antagonizing allies is a crazy, if typical, way for Trump to start his second term, especially a NATO member like Denmark that has boosted its defense spending, as Trump has demanded. Drawing the ire of France and the European Union doesn’t bode well for the future, especially with Trump planning to institute tariffs as soon as he is sworn in.

Trump is also threatening Canada with making it the “51st state” and angered Panama’s president with his desire to retake the canal. If he’s serious about any of his territorial ambitions, Trump might face serious opposition, with countries taking action against the United States.