Paul Fleury

8 hrs

Immigration / April 17, 2025
Abrego Garcia Is ‘Not a Maryland Man’
How bad do Democrats look after working themselves into a lather over a deported illegal alien gangster and wife-beater?

The Trump administration’s strategy was deviously brilliant.

First, they deported a Salvadoran citizen who illegally crossed into the U.S. but who had a “withholding of removal” order. They sent him to El Salvador, the one place he couldn’t legally be deported, though that deserves an asterisk.

Next, they bobbed and weaved with shifting and sometimes eyebrow-raising explanations while Democrats and the Leftmedia became increasingly apoplectic and willing to go to great lengths to defend and save Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Instead of rightly calling him an illegal alien, they dubbed him a “Maryland man,” and Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen literally flew to El Salvador (maybe on the taxpayers’ dime) in a failed attempt to meet with Garcia and bring him back “home” to the U.S. Van Hollen says he “won’t rest” in his fight to save a “wrongfully abducted” man, and several House Democrats are planning a similar trip to back him up.

(Thanks to Democrats, we live in Clown World.)

Then came the coup de grâce. During a Wednesday press conference featuring the mother of Rachel Morin, who was brutally raped and murdered last year by an illegal alien convicted on Monday, the administration released information showing that Garcia is indeed a drug- and human-trafficking MS-13 gang member and a wife-beater against whom his American citizen wife had filed a protective order. (Now, though, she stands by her “amazing” man.)

As DHS posted on X:

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday, "He will never live in the United States of America again.”

Here’s a towel for Democrats to wipe that egg off their faces.

Let’s rewind a minute to make the picture even clearer. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, cheered on by every Democrat who used to favor border security, facilitated an intentional invasion of upwards of 10 million illegals. They effectively erased the border, made a mockery of the asylum process, and destroyed the immigration system by overwhelming it. They created a humanitarian crisis at the border — in fact, nationwide — and then told us illegals are more law-abiding than the rest of us, despite a derelict lack of statistics on illegal alien crime.

Speaking of crime, when the Tennessee Highway Patrol detained Garcia in 2022 on suspicion of human trafficking, Biden’s FBI ordered his release.

Now Democrats suddenly care about due process? No, they don’t; it’s a farce. They want every last illegal alien and then some to stay in America, fundamentally changing our nation forever and giving Democrats lasting political power.

As a constitutional conservative first, I have argued that the remedy to the broken border must be lawful. You can’t restore the Rule of Law by running roughshod over it.

However, we don’t live in an ideal world.

As I noted above, Democrats have so thoroughly demolished the system that the Trump administration clearly views it as a trite and counterproductive nicety to pretend like there’s a real process anymore. The policy is essentially this: Get illegals out of here as fast as possible by whatever means necessary. Go ahead; try and stop us.

12 hrs

Big Tech / April 17, 2025
We Thought Facebook Had Quit ‘Fact-Checking’
Based on yet another round with the censorship regime, we were wrong.

In January, Meta announced the end of its fact-checking regime, and the people rejoiced!

In the months leading to the official end in April, Meta would move to a community notes feature like on X. Instead of biased “journalist” gatekeepers (read: opinion-checkers) deciding who was allowed to speak, hundreds of thousands of volunteers would contribute suggested corrections to incorrect information. An algorithm eliminates personal bias and rewards contributors for open and honest suggestions. Instead of silencing speech, it elevates it. Instead of punishing opposing viewpoints, it encourages conversation.

Your humble team at The Patriot Post has been no stranger to the assault on free speech from Big Tech, social media companies, and especially fact-checkers. We can cite example after example after example of the systematic assault on free speech by the self-appointed arbiters of digital truth.

But according to Zuckerberg, this was all coming to an end!

Or was it?

On April 7, the very day that Meta announced the official end to fact-checking in America, we were hit with this:

Ah, yes, “missing context.” Our favorite editorial catch-all. What makes this one interesting is that it’s from an Italian fact-checker. It isn’t the first time we have dealt with an international outfit, but considering that fact-checking was supposed to end, the location of this source may be more significant.

Here’s what I think happened:

The EU’s Digital Service Act (DSA) was signed into European law in February 2024. It requires large social media companies to control misinformation on their platforms. I suspect this will cause Meta problems as it learns how to navigate the international legal consequences. It may be easy enough to turn off the fact-checkers in America, but isolating Americans from receiving fact-checks from international outfits may be more difficult. After all, social media posts certainly appear in feeds across the globe regardless of their origin. I have often likened the process of turning off the fact-checkers to slowing down a freight train. These are big, heavy systems that must slow down gradually to avoid crashing. While having fact-checkers should have never been a thing, we can at least appreciate that it will take time to correct the wrongdoing.

What is totally unacceptable is that Meta instantly broke the promise that there would be no more penalties within the United States:

In the United States, we have a community-based program called Community Notes. It’s currently in its initial testing phase, and we will continue to improve it over the course of the year before expansion to other countries. Community Notes do not have penalties associated with them, nor do they impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared. In certain countries outside the United States, we work with independent third-party fact checkers.

In the same policy document, Meta does admit that international fact-checking will continue. But it is very clear that penalties within the U.S. are supposed to be ended.

Not for The Patriot Post!

Since receiving this fact-check on April 7, we have experienced a rapid decline in content performance on Facebook. It has dropped over 20% and keeps dropping, and this is in just a week.

So, it seems that our never-ending saga with Facebook and the self-appointed arbiters of digital truth continues. There has undoubtedly been a massive shift in the environment, and there is still hope where so much despair was before, but it still remains to be seen how much longer we must deal with the censors.

Till then, we press on.

13 hrs

Education / April 17, 2025
Trump to Harvard: FAFO
The president didn’t take kindly to the intransigence of the filthy rich bastion of Jew hatred.

When an American president — or a business executive, or any leader in life — is met with an obstacle, he can pretty much do one of three things: ignore it, accommodate it, or attack it.

Regarding Donald Trump’s commitment to stamping out both anti-Semitism and DEI-driven racial discrimination at Harvard and other elite “educational” enclaves, the first two options appear to be nonstarters. So, Trump being Trump, he’s going all in on the third option.

The Associated Press sets the stage this way: “On one side is Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, with a brand so powerful that its name is synonymous with prestige. On the other side is the Trump administration, determined to go further than any other White House to reshape American higher education.”

We’re not so sure Harvard’s name is still “synonymous with prestige” — not after having been slapped by the Supreme Court two years ago for its racially discriminatory admissions policies, and not after having been taken to the woodshed by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for its willingness to accommodate Jew hatred. But whatever.

Earlier this week, Harvard used its official X account to announce that it wouldn’t accede to the Trump administration’s demands to stamp out the DEI and the anti-Semitism in its midst: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Not the Bee called ‘em out: “The federal government forcing you to obey the constitution is not the same as the federal government taking you over. But when you’re as intellectually dull as the people that work at Harvard, that’s what you think.”

Meanwhile, intrepid author and Claremont Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl focused on another weakness in Harvard’s argument: “LOL. Your privilege is showing. You want the billions of dollars of federal funding, but you don’t want to be held accountable to the Federal government. It doesn’t work like that.”

1 d

Faith / April 17, 2025
Trump’s Easter Message Is Quite the Opposite of Biden’s
The president acknowledged our one nation being under God in a very Christ-centered celebration of Holy Week.

What a difference a year makes. Last year, Easter Sunday fell on March 31, so naturally, President Joe Biden, a “very devout” Catholic, made a big deal out of the Resurrection Transgender Day of Visibility, which happened to coincide with the most holy of Christian days.

His Easter message was simple: “To all those gathering in churches and homes around the world today: Happy Easter. May God bless and keep you.”

Compare that to the following message about Transgender Day of Visibility: “On Transgender Day of Visibility, we celebrate the joy, strength, and absolute courage of some of the bravest people I know. Today, we show millions of transgender and nonbinary Americans that we see them, they belong, and they should be treated with dignity and respect.” Below the message was a large image with the hollow leftist phrase, “Trans rights are human rights.”

It was made abundantly clear that Transgender Day of Visibility was more important to Biden because it represents a key liturgical holiday in the gender-confusion celebration calendar dreamed up by LGBTQ+ activists.

In stark contrast, President Donald Trump appropriately started this year’s Easter celebration on April 13, Palm Sunday. He didn’t have to contend with the “disputing holiday” — nor would he if presented with that choice because this president doesn’t kowtow to the gender ideologues.

Here is what Trump had to say:

This Holy Week, Christians around the World remember the Crucifixion of God’s Only Begotten Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ and, on Easter Sunday, we celebrate His Glorious Resurrection and proclaim, as Christians have done for nearly 2,000 years, “HE IS RISEN!”

Through the pain and sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, we saw God’s boundless Love and Devotion to all Humanity and, in that moment of His Resurrection, History was forever changed with the Promise of Everlasting Life.

As we approach this Joyous Easter Sunday, I want to wish Christians everywhere a Happy and very Blessed Holiday. America is a Nation of Believers. We need God, we want God and, with His help, we will make our Nation Stronger, Safer, Greater, more Prosperous, and more United than ever before. Thank you, and HAPPY EASTER!

The statement was joyful and celebratory, proclaiming the reason for the holiday and also acknowledging the profound truth. America is a Christian nation, but we have also wandered and are in desperate need of God’s help.

“No one can serve two masters,” Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. “You cannot serve God and money.” But this can also mean that one cannot serve both God and the secular world.

In serving the secular world, Biden made our country worse culturally and spiritually. What’s even sadder is that he is a professing Christian who chose to glorify the (foolish) ideas of man (i.e., Transgender Day of Visibility) rather than elevate and proclaim the Truth of God, which he claims to believe. In his attempt to “separate church and state,” he merely elevated the cult of gender ideology over Christians on Easter.

Through his public statements, Trump is honoring God and creating an atmosphere whereby believers across the country can celebrate Him. This is a unifying message. We pray that God is indeed working to reform our nation as Christians gather this week to walk through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday so that we can rejoice with all believers on Easter Sunday, greeting one another with a resounding, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!”

1 d

"You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free"

America Faces Judgment, But Christians Live With Hope
By Jeffrey Ludwig
April 14, 2025

We as individuals and a society are under judgment. Trump is like Josiah, who was a good king, but the judgment prophecies brought by Jeremiah (who began prophesying during the reign of Josiah) to the effect that Judah would be destroyed were still in effect. Even though he's "good," Trump is also like Cyrus who allowed a large contingent of Jews in Babylon to return to their homeland. He was a sympathetic and wise ruler, but he did not worship God. Trump is not a born-again Christian, but to his credit (not his salvation), he is in sympathy with some of our beliefs.

A national right to an abortion guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution was overturned, but the right of individual states to allow abortion is still allowed. So infant murder continues at a high level even though certain more Christian states are allowed to disallow or opt out of most abortions.

Hopefully, Obergefell v. Hodges will also be overturned like Roe v. Wade, and so-called "gay marriage" (anything but "gay" will be overturned as a Constitutionally enjoined "right." I'm a bit more optimistic because 36 states have already voted against homosexual marriage (including California twice). So, if it goes back to the states, hopefully, almost all states will reject it as a legally authorized arrangement.

Meanwhile, birth rates outside of marriage are high. Divorce rates are 50%. People are marrying later in life, or they are increasingly living together without being married. Drug use is up, and marijuana is legalized in many states. Dependence on government is increasingly replacing belief in the individual's responsibility to live a responsible, moral life and to provide for himself or herself unless they are disabled by a physical or mental impairment. Birth rates are down among evangelicals and people of European descent as we are overrun by people of Asian or Middle Eastern descent, or by Roman Catholics (practicing and non-practicing) from Latin America.