Opinion
Judge Andrew P. Napolitano: Can Congress Ban TikTok?

From Heartland Daily News
“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”
–First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
When James Madison set about to draft the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution — he was articulating what lawyers and philosophers and judges call “negative rights.” A positive right grants a privilege, like a driver’s license. A negative right restrains the government from interfering with a preexisting right. In order to emphasize his view that the freedom of speech preexisted the government, Madison insisted that the word “the” precede “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment.
If the freedom of speech preceded the government, where did it come from?
Speech is a natural right; it comes from our humanity. The framers of the Constitution and the ratifiers of the Bill of Rights understood and recognized this. Congress doesn’t grant the freedom of speech; rather it is prohibited absolutely from interfering with it. In the years following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the courts began applying the restrictions in the First Amendment to the states and their municipalities and subdivisions.
Today, the First Amendment bars all government — federal, state and local — and all branches of government — legislative, executive and judicial — from interfering with the freedom of speech.
You’d never know this listening to Congress today. The same Congress that can’t balance a budget or count the number of foreign military bases the feds own, that thinks it can right any wrong and tax any event, that has borrowed over $34 trillion and not paid back any of it; the same Congress now wants to give the President of the United States — whomever might occupy that office — the lawful power to suppress websites he thinks are spying on their users or permitting foreign governments to influence what folks see on the sites. All this is an effort to ban the popular website for young folks called TikTok and force its owners to sell its assets.
Here is the backstory.
Throughout American history, we have suffered from mass fears. In the 1790s, it was fear of the French and of Native Americans. In the 1860s, it was fear of African Americans and fear of Confederates. In the 1900s, it was fear of anarchists, Nazis and Communists. In the first quarter of the present century, the government has whipped up fear of terrorists, Russians, Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin and now the Chinese.
In his dystopian novel, “1984,” George Orwell analyzed the totalitarian mind and recognized the need that totalitarians have for fear and hatred. They know that when folks are afraid, they will bargain away the reality of liberty for the illusion of safety. Without fear and hatred, totalitarians have fewer tools for control of the population.
What is the government’s problem with TikTok? The feds want to use fear and hatred of the Chinese government in order to regulate the sources of data and information that Americans can consult. They have projected upon the government of China the very same unlawful and unconstitutional assaults on natural rights that the feds themselves perpetrate upon us.
Thus, in order to gain control over the American public, the deep state — the parts of the government that do not change, no matter which political party is in power — and its friends in Congress have advanced the myth that the Chinese government, which commands the loyalty of the owners of TikTok, might use the site to pass along misinformation or to spy on its users. The key word here is “might,” as the intelligence officials who testified to Congress on this were unable to produce any solid evidence — just fear — that the Chinese government is doing this.
You can’t make this up.
Remember the bumper stickers from the 1970s: “Don’t steal. The government hates competition!” I thought of that line when analyzing this. Why? Because the federal government itself spies on every American who uses a computer or mobile device. The federal government itself captures every keystroke touched on every device in the U.S. The federal government itself captures all data transmitted into, out of and within the U.S. on fiber-optic cables. And the federal government itself told the Supreme Court earlier this week that it needs to be able to influence what data is available on websites in order to combat misinformation.
The federal government basically told the court that it — and not individual persons — should decide what we can read and from what sources. What the federal government did not reveal is its rapacious desire to control the free market in ideas.
Now back to the First Amendment.
The principal value underlying the freedom of speech is free will. We all have free will to think as we wish, to say what we think, to read what we want, to publish what we say. And we can do all this with perfect freedom. We don’t need a government permission slip. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to guarantee this freedom by keeping the government out of the business of speech — totally and completely. This is the law of the land in modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Were this not the law, then the government could suppress the speech it hates and fears and support the speech of its patrons. And then the values that underly the First Amendment would be degraded and negated. The government has no moral or constitutional authority to spy on us or to influence our thoughts. Period.
Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Have we consented to a nullification of free speech in deference to whomever might be living in the White House? Why do we repose the Constitution into the hands of those who subvert it?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
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Crime
First Good Battlefield News From Trump’s Global War on Fentanyl

From
for the Daily WireMaltz attributes slowing fentanyl smuggling directly to Trump’s controversial 25% trade tariffs, which compelled the first Mexican military raids against production labs in Sinaloa Cartel-controlled Culiacán, Mexico.
It’s early but not too early to note that President Donald Trump’s all-out World War on cross-border fentanyl smuggling into the United States, the highly lethal synthetic opiate responsible for 120,000 American overdose deaths in recent years, is achieving remarkable impacts for the first time in a decade.
A key indicator of broader total smuggling at and between the southern border’s ports of entry — U.S. law enforcement seizures of fentanyl — has dropped 50% since the November election, indicating a greater decline in total fentanyl smuggling.
That decline is attributable to Trump’s reset of U.S. Customs and Border Protection orders to aggressively hunt the drug as they and thousands of active-duty soldiers are now free of the distracting duty of processing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border every month throughout Joe Biden’s term. Trump policies quickly ended that mass migration distraction, as I wrote in The Daily Wire on March 20.

A 2024 seizure of fentanyl pills manufactured in Mexico. DEA photo.
For context on the change with inbound fentanyl flows, from 2019 to 2023, the amounts seized rose every year in tandem with American overdose deaths and remained high in the 2,000-pound monthly range during 2024.
But In December and January, President-elect Trump threatened devastating trade tariffs against Mexico if they did not seriously crack down on cartel production and smuggling even before he entered office.
From October 2024 to January 2025, Southwest Border seizures of fentanyl fell from 2,000 pounds in 85 seizure events, to 990 pounds in 47 seizure events, CBP seizure data shows. Then in February 2025, seizures plummeted even further to 590 pounds in 45 events.
Combined, those January and February numbers are 50% less than the same period in 2024 and among the very lowest monthlies recorded since 2020.

City of Scottsdale, AZ, police department.
Ranking administration officials, Border Patrol supervisors who hunt the drug on the ground, and media reporting from cartel laboratory-infested regions of Mexico tell us that March’s seizure numbers will solidify a reversal of a deadly decade-long upward fentanyl smuggling trend.
“Trump’s policies are having an impact, one hundred percent,” Acting Administrator of Trump’s Drug Enforcement Administration Derek Maltz told me for this Daily Wire story. And for Americans concerned about the scourge of fentanyl, there’s much more they will find surprising.
A Remarkable Display Of Cartel Pragmatism In Response To Trump

Derek S. Maltz, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Photo by Gabe Skidmore. Wikimedia Commons.
What Maltz said next almost defies commonly believed narratives about Mexico’s cartel crime syndicates — especially the idea that they are more impulsively violent than strategic and pragmatic. Yet, according to Maltz, cartel leaders appear to have opted for a surprising strategic change in the face of Trump’s campaign against them over fentanyl.
The cartels appear to have determined that since Trump is so bad for business, they have decided to quit smuggling it into the American market and send it to Europe and other parts of the world instead. What to do about the lost revenue? Easy. Make up the difference by shipping greater volumes of less-politically and physiologically lethal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, Maltz said.
“We got their attention with a lot of talk about the deaths in America, and the cartels got very concerned. It became a business decision.” Maltz told me.
Indeed, cartels in the fentanyl crosshairs are facing a unique, existential threat that no prior president in modern times has imposed, over just this one line of cartel business. While it’s too early for anyone to declare victory in Trump’s unprecedented war on fentanyl, Maltz attributes slowing fentanyl smuggling directly to Trump’s controversial 25% trade tariffs, which compelled the first Mexican military raids against production labs in Sinaloa Cartel-controlled Culiacán, Mexico.
After his November 2024 election win, Trump vowed to follow through with executive orders that would establish punishing tariffs on China for tolerating the export of precursor fentanyl-making chemicals to Mexico. And almost since inauguration day, Trump’s moves have compelled the destruction of laboratories.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
He designated nine Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations subject to global financial isolation, surveillance and terrorism charges for anyone who partners with them.
The cartels no doubt also felt heat from unspecified threats of possible U.S. military action against them and their labs. Indeed, Trump has increased U.S. spy flights over Mexico, repositioned CIA officers into Mexico, deployed war ships to the Pacific and Gulf of America, and put specialized light infantry divisions on the southern border facing Mexico.
An Unlikely Source Of Credit For Trump: The New York Times
As part of the Trump administration, Maltz might be expected to lose some credibility by crediting his boss’s policies for good news about fentanyl.
Maltz is hardly alone, however, in attributing Trump’s policies to early apparent success. Natalie Kitroeff, the New York Times’ Mexico City bureau chief toured some manufacturing labs in the city of Culiacán with another reporter in December 2024, the Sinaloa Cartel-controlled city believed to be Mexico’s central hub for manufacturing fentanyl with well over 100 labs.

Getty Images. View of the historic center of Culiacán, capital city of the state of Sinaloa, with the main Alvaro Obregón street that runs from north to south.
In a March 2025 interview on the newspaper’s The Daily podcast, Kitroeff said she returned to Culiacán after Trump’s inauguration “to see whether all of the pressure that Trump had put on Mexico had led to real changes, whether any of this actually made a difference.”
After serendipitously witnessing Mexican troops raiding labs as she drove through Culiacán on a follow-up trip, Kitroeff’s conclusion was clear.
“It was really remarkable. The dynamics, it seemed, had completely changed from the last time we were there,” she said, adding that her cartel sources “told us there was basically no production of fentanyl happening in the city. It had totally plummeted, fallen off a cliff” because “there is such an intense crackdown by the government right now.”
“Is this all because of Trump?” the show’s host Michael Barbaro asked Kitroeff.
“Yeah, I think that’s what it looks like to a lot of people, a lot of regular Mexicans, a lot of cartel members, and a lot of security experts who have been studying this for a long time,” she responded.
“I think it’s pretty clear that the amount of progress, arrests, raids, lab busts, the pace of these actions is something that we’ve not seen in recent history in Mexico. One analyst told us, we’ve seen in one month what we might have seen in years,” Kitroeff continued. “I think what we’ve seen is that at least in this context, in this month, and in this place, the tariffs worked, for now at least.”
The reporter and Maltz said production still goes on elsewhere in Mexico.
But Maltz said his government intelligence suggests the cartels are contemplating shipping the drug to Europe, Australia and to other wealthy developed countries but not as much to the United States because of the Trump heat.
“They’re going to produce it and ship it over that way instead,” he said. “There’s a very good chance that other parts of the world may be getting shipments of fentanyl from the cartels, unless they just curtail the production altogether, which I don’t see happening.”
He and others also note that U.S. law enforcement began seizing higher volumes of cocaine and methamphetamine smuggled over the border since Trump’s election instead of fentanyl, also suggesting a self-preserving cartel strategy change.
What About American Deaths?

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Another vital indicator that warrants tracking as a means to judge the long-term success of Trump’s muscular fentanyl initiatives: overdose deaths.
It’s just too early to know how the apparently falling smuggling rates translate into saved lives. Significant declines in overdose deaths began a year ago, according to the latest Center for Disease Control report on the subject, which lags real time by four months. Death rates fell by 24% for the 12 months through September 2024, from 114,000 to a still outrageous 87,000. The CDC attributes the decline to better life-saving treatment and awareness programs inside the United States but also to a factor it dubs without elaboration “shifts in the illegal drug supply.”

National Center for Health Statistics. CDC.
That factor almost assuredly is a reference to a secretive deal that President Joe Biden bartered for Mexico in December 2023 to deploy 35,000 troops with orders to militarily contain illegal immigration flows in deep southern Mexico to help Biden’s presidential reelection campaign defend its border policies against Trump. Mexico responded to Biden’s favor request with major impactful force throughout the Biden or Harris reelection campaign that dramatically reduced human smuggling, as I frequently reported, and also no doubt hindered some fentanyl smuggling.
Trump watchers and all Americans who authentically care about the extreme damage this drug from Mexico has wrought on the United States should hope seizures continue to plummet as this likely means less is getting smuggled over. But Americans deserve to know if “shifts in illegal drug supply” is saving far more American lives.
If that body count number alone continues an even faster decline, Trump will have earned his country’s enduring gratitude and a place of reverence in American history. So far, anyway, the early results give rise to optimism.
* * *
Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”
Opinion
Some scientists advocate creating human bodies for ‘spare parts.’

From LifeSiteNews
The Stanford researchers admit that some people may find these ideas about clones repugnant but justify them on the basis of research already in progress.
In the 2005 sci-fi thriller The Island, Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor discover that they are clones, created as an “insurance policy” for wealthy people who might need them for “spare parts.” Now, scientists at Stanford are proposing that we make this dystopian fiction a reality. On March 25, 2025, Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi wrote in MIT Technology Review:
Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.
These researchers say that “human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.” Using techniques reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (in which fetuses destined for menial tasks are selectively poisoned to diminish their intelligence), they propose using human stem cells and artificial wombs to create human clones which they call “bodyoids.” The article describes it this way:
Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of “bodyoids”—a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.
The researchers say that these neurologically impaired human clones could provide an almost unlimited source of organs, tissues, and cells for use in transplantation. They admit that some people may find these ideas repugnant but justify them on the basis of research already in progress. They correctly point out that we are already using neurologically injured people as research test subjects.
“Brain dead” people who are biologically alive but who have been declared legally dead are currently being used as test hosts for the implantation of genetically modified pig livers and kidneys. These brain-injured people who are being used as xenograft hosts are certainly alive (since they are stable enough to be used as test subjects for implanted animal organs) until they are killed at the end of the experiment for further anatomical and microscopic analysis. The Stanford scientists use this ethically problematic practice to justify creating human clones for research: “In all these cases, nothing was, legally, a living human being at the time it was used for research. Human bodyoids would also fall into that category.”
The scientists admit that human cloning raises ethical problems, saying that the use of bodyoids “might diminish the human status of real people who lack consciousness or sentience.” But the article is clearly written in the spirit of the ends justifying the means. In their call for action, the authors conclude, “Caution is warranted, but so is bold vision; the opportunity is too important to ignore.”
On the contrary, the value of every human being is what is too important to ignore. We value and protect every person because they are made in the image of God, regardless of the way they were brought into the world. Using unconscious people as research subjects is wrong, both in the case of brain-injured people declared “legally dead” (under the logical fallacy of brain death), and also with this new proposal for bioengineering human clones. Salve Regina University philosopher Dr. Peter J. Colosi explains it this way:
You, as the person who you are, exist even when you are not conscious, and this means that other human beings who are not conscious could also do that. In the branch of philosophy that I am calling Christian personalism, there have been many convincing arguments developed to show the reasonableness of the presence of a person in all classes of nonconscious or minimally conscious living human beings.
Also, it is wrong to create people with the sole purpose of using them to fulfill our own desires. Dr. Colosi makes this clear:
Furthermore, the creation of human beings with the deliberate intent to destroy some of them for the sake of others…is a clear example of what Pope Francis has referred to as “The Throw Away Culture”: The throwaway culture says, “I use you as much as I need you. When I am not interested in you anymore, or you are in my way, I throw you out.” It is especially the weakest who are treated this way — unborn children, the elderly, the needy, and the disadvantaged.”
Creating people to be used as commodities for “spare parts” is unconscionable. Do we really want to be spending our taxpayer dollars this way? Yet Stanford Medicine’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education just received a $70 million NIH grant. The purpose of this grant is to “accelerate the translation of newly discovered biomedical treatments into interventions that improve patient care and population health.”
READ: The case of Zack Dunlap shows the incoherence of ‘brain death’
Rather than accelerating, we need to stop, expose, and defund these morally abhorrent attempts to purposely bioengineer neurologically impaired human clones as a source of “spare parts.” A pro-life ethic protects all human life from experimentation and abuse.
Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ harvesting and transplantation. She is the author of The Brain Death Fallacy, and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.
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