It was a beautiful Thursday evening, enjoying a baseball game in Kansas City with my lovely wife. Truth be told, I’m not much of a sports fan. My wife is. But I enjoy watching Lori and our youngest daughter immersed in the experience. Plus, it’s fun to cheer for the home team. In between those moments, I often catch up on reading the latest news. This particular evening, I saw that Tacoma-based U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle issued an activist ruling to block the Trump administration from implementing a common-sense ban on people who claim a so-called "transgender" status from infiltrating the ranks of the U.S. military.

I could write in depth why these people are not actually attempting to "serve," given the inordinate special deference that they demand, on top of being entirely non-deployable, and requiring mental health and medical services at a much higher rate than normal soldiers. I recall a friend of mine who had to be our unit equal opportunity representative in 2021 tell me about being forced to sit through training that included someone who was clearly a man with—in my friend’s words—“bolt on t*ts”—and the pressure to confirm that this undeniably male person was a female. While Judge Settle said that the military hasn’t produced enough data to prove that people pretending to be another gender haven’t served successfully, all evidence shows that allowing and coddling such people in the ranks proves a drain on resources and induces moral injury to those who are pressured to conform to the anthropological lies of our age. 

RELATED: Pentagon Orders Discharge of Transgenders

Federal Judge Ana Reyes Likely to Block Trump Ban on Trans in the Military

With a grounded understanding of this reality, and personal experience of harassment over this very topic when I was a military officer, it is clear to me that defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempts to return the most basic sense of normalcy to the military’s ranks is rightly ordered toward what T.S. Elliot referred to as The Permanent Things. As such, in that ballgame moment, I made a post on X expressing that people who are obsessed with radical gender ideology cannot be trusted to protect Americans. In the old Twitter, I would have expected to face some sort of retributive action. In the new X, I figured that common-sense argument aligned with what the platform’s owner has stated would fit within what X considered free speech. But apparently not.

Soon afterward, I received an automated email from X telling me that my common-sense position violated rules against "hateful conduct."

After rolling my eyes, I figured that this was simply an automated filter that misunderstood the meaning of my post. So I filed an appeal that explained the fuller context and mentioned that my expression of real-world understanding of gender ideology matches that of X’s owner. “A human will read the appeal and see that the system got it wrong” was what I incorrectly thought. 

Two days later, I received a follow-up from the human review of my post. The verdict: “Our support team has determined that a violation of our rules did take place, specifically around: Violating our rules against hateful conduct. Therefore, we will not overturn our decision to limit your post’s visibility.”

This is what I would have expected in the pre-October 2022 days when the platform then known as Twitter was an unapologetic piece of the 1984-esque thought regime run by progressives who still seek a fundamental transformation of the United States into a totalitarian bastion. But I found it surprising in mid-2025. 

Rather than merely being annoyed, I viewed the moment as an opportunity to learn. How do the people who run X’s support team determine what constitutes “hateful conduct?” To this day, there remain tweets on the platform that call for me to be investigated, fired, physically assaulted, and even murdered by a few very small people who dislike some of my writing. Since that’s not hateful conduct, what else is?

My post for consideration here said 

Perverts who are trying to overturn everything about the order upon which society is built WILL NOT PROTECT Americans. 

The same applies to trannies and corrupt judges. 

Neither groups can be trusted in positions of public trust.

Since that’s "hateful conduct" according to X, I looked up the official rules on the topic. They state the following:

You may not directly attack other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

Using these parameters, I conducted a test of tweets that replaced the words "trannies and corrupt judges" with the following combinations that address each category of protected classes according to X:

• “Christians and sympathetic judges.”
• “Pro-Life Americans and sympathetic judges”
• “Conservatives and textualist judges”
• “Republicans and textualist judges”
• “Married heterosexuals and sympathetic judges”
• “Old people and sympathetic judges”
• “Disabled people and sympathetic judges”

Not one of those posts triggered a “hateful conduct” alert. 

When it comes to this game of thought authorization, either all classes set apart in policy for protection are off limits, or none are. Selectively-enforced policy is illegitimate at best, and usually grows into tyranny. Of course, X is a privately owned company. But the argument we have heard since it was purchased by Elon Musk is that new ownership intended to make it a freer place of discussion. That has been largely true. But the aspiration remains yet to be fully realized.

Under Musk’s direction, X has become far closer to a legitimate place of online town hall than Twitter ever was… and I am grateful for it. But no bureaucracy is safe from those within who perpetuate the legacy agenda through their selective enforcement of policy toward immoral ideological ends. Every such instance chips away at the belief that X is now a free space for common sense. 

Though today’s platform is markedly improved from Twitter, this recent experience gave me my first doubts under the new management. If you’re listening, Mr. Musk, I ask you to protect your investment and fix this illegitimate practice when it comes to free speech policy.