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The TSA’s 20th Birthday Should Be Its Last

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Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush signed The Aviation and Transportation Security Act into Law. It created the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA was created as a response to 9/11 and is considered a vital tool in confronting terror in the air.

Twenty-two years later, TSA still has over 54,000 employees and an $8 billion budget. They also have a history of harassing passengers without good reasons. The TSA, far from contributing to safety, is an amazing example of government failure. Its ridiculous travel restrictions render air travel unsafe, deny passengers their civil liberties and make flying more expensive, tedious, frustrating, and inconvenient. This agency shouldn’t have been established, and the 20th anniversary of its creation is the best time to repeal it.

First, TSA frequently fails to fulfill its core purpose: stopping passengers from taking deadly weapons aboard planes. TSA agents are constantly missing weapons and drugs when they try to bring them in for testing.

“TSA screeners failed to detect weapons, drugs, and explosives almost 80 percent of the time,” noted the Heritage Foundation in 2017. While the exact failure rate cannot be determined, several sources have indicated that it exceeds 70%. During one test, at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, the TSA’s failure rate was 95 percent.

It was a frightening time for America when a few men managed to use simple, crude weapons to hijack planes and smash them into buildings. U.S. government promised to be even more vigilant. It is easy to prevent hijackings. The cockpit doors can be locked by pilots, making them almost invulnerable for outsiders. Before 9/11, most hijackings of airplanes required detours to other locations. Hijackers were not planning to crash planes so neither passengers nor crew had any reason to resist. This is a new reality: Would-be hijackers of planes will have insurmountable problems, regardless of whether they receive aggressive pat-downs by the TSA.

TSA security has made flying more challenging. Not only are you subject to humiliation, but also the need to take off your belts and shoes and empty all of your bags and luggage, before being subject to scanners. TSA agents can also be caught taking passengers’ luggage, touching them and delaying their departures without any reason. It is not worth it. This does not make us safer. It actually makes us more secure. We offer less You are safer: Many people prefer to drive instead of dealing with the hassle. However, car travel is highly recommended. Further more dangerous than air travel—many more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes each year. COVID-19 is not enough to tip the odds in favour of planes, says The Washington Post.

There is no other way. It is absurd that Americans would have to live in such miserable conditions under this pointless bureaucracy. It was just after its creation that the TSA was abolished. Second-best is right now.

New York Times Columnist David Brooks wrote a great recap of Orlando’s National Conservatism Conference. Atlantic. He makes many of these criticisms in his article. ReasonStephanie Slade of the Right has taken aim at the most recent intellectual trend.

It is wrong for the NatCons to assume that “the left” hates America and can be united under one umbrella. These are just the kinds of apocalyptic threats that many of them invented to support their vote for Donald Trump.

It is also wrong to believe that there exists a “wokeist Anschluss” taking control of all American institutions. People who are so vocal about social media’s evils seem to be spending a lot of time on Twitter. Ninety percent is about this discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.…

The NatCon public posture is also very off-putting. Many of the NatCon attendees are, in my opinion, charming, friendly, and welcoming. However, their public persona is overshadowed by the fear-based psychology of menace and threat. There was not one word of grace, sympathy or kindness that I heard from Orlando’s podium. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.…

As I sat in the Orlando hotel I thought of NatCon World as a new type of theme park. It was a closed dystopian world with its own concocted thrills and chills. To console myself, I noted that the NatCon theme park was created by a handful of intellectuals who had a distorted view of American history and politics. The sad truth is, America’s rare NatCon World is only one part of an illiberal populist rebellion that is growing and strong.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

President Joe Biden appointed Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as an attorney and progressive critic of numerous conservative media outlets. Sohn co-founded Public Knowledge in the past, which was an advocacy group encouraging cable operators to cease airing right-wing channels. Her previous calls to the FCC were to cancel Sinclair Broadcast Group’s broadcast license due to its conservative bias.

Fox News, she said, is much more dangerous than Facebook for democracy. BreitbartAllum Bokhari (tech reporter) described her as “pro-censorship leftist” warning that confirmation by the FCC of her would spell doom for conservative news stations.

One conservative network disagrees with this statement: One America News Network (OANN). According to, the network “works behind-the scenes” to garner conservative support for Gigi. The Washington Free Beacon. Why? Well:

Bradley Blakeman, a conservative political operative, told The Washington Free Beacon OANN president personally organized for Sohn to appear on a segment pro-Sohn. OANN executives think Sohn will be a ally in OANN’s battle to take market share from Fox News.

Sohn’s critique of Fox News is the root cause of this belief. Sohn has questioned whether Fox News should be investigated for being “state-sponsored propaganda with few if any opposing viewpoints.” Fox News and OANN compete for many of the same viewers, and former president Donald Trump encouraged his voters to leave Fox News for OANN or right-wing outlet Newsmax.

Sohn called upon the FCC’s intervention in dispute between cable companies and small content providers such as OANN. Sohn, Newsmax and OANN were the top three cable companies in 2018. found themselves fighting on the same side against the more powerful conservative network Sinclair. According to Blakeman, OANN executives believe that, if confirmed, Sohn will support them in “carriage disputes” with carriers like AT&T and Comcast.

OANN president Charles Herring endorsed Sohn in a letter last week, praising her “strong belief and advocacy for diversity in the programming lineup.” According to a source familiar with the matter, Herring will meet with Republican senators at Capitol Hill in order to promote Sohn’s nomination. Blakeman was also invited to speak on behalf of Sohn by Herring, who is a former advisor to George W. Bush.

Blakeman, in an interview that was aired Friday by OANN, noted that Sohn disagrees with cancel culture. She also praised her regulatory credentials.

Conservative news networks support the confirmation of progressive government bureaucrats because they believe the bureaucrat can make life worse for competitors. These are principles.

• Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is begging Democrats to reform marijuana laws before the GOP retakes control of Congress. The bills will not be passed if the Republicans take back control, as I believe they will. Our leadership is against them.

• Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director has resigned.

• The College Democrats of America is collapsing amid several different cancel culture scandals: One young leader has been asked to denounce a bad tweet she sent when she was 13.

• An analysis of National Science Foundation grants between 1990 and 2020 found an increasing leftward slant.

• “Futurists have their heads in the clouds”: some predictions for the year 2050.

• Early midterm preference for Republicans has reached an all-time high: