Welcome to the RedState Weekly Briefing  — where we take a quick look at the week’s most viewed stories in case you missed any of them. Grab a cup of coffee and sit down with this 21st Century Weekend Edition of your favorite (online) publication!

#1 – BREAKING: Matt Taibbi Drops More Information on the ‘Twitter Files’ and Exposes an Attempted Cover-Up — by Bonchie 

As Taibbi notes, the next installment of the “Twitter Files” is being led by controversial (as in she makes the right people upset) reporter Bari Weiss. Apparently, while she was working on her part of the effort, she discovered that someone on the backend was curating what was being released. When she inquired about who it was, she discovered it was none other than James Baker.

Baker is a name many people who read RedState will likely recall. He was at the center of the Steele Dossier and was part of the FBI regime that tried to bring down Donald Trump via the “Russian collusion” hoax. Naturally, he left that post to take a high-paying job as chief counsel for Twitter because government hacks who toe the line always have a path to the private sector.

#2 – Tom Cotton’s Response to Woke CEO Looking for Republican Help Is Absolute Fire — by Bonchie 

What Cotton says in that clip is what I’ve been begging Republicans to say for years, and I mean that literally. I’ve written several pieces urging the GOP to decouple from woke corporations, making them live with the consequences of their political pursuits (see It’s Time to Call the Bluff of These Woke Corporations, Here’s How to Do It). I’m not suggesting Cotton reads my work, but it’s still nice to be on the same page for once.

There has to be a fundamental shift in the relationship between the corporate world and the GOP. That can’t happen as long as big business is allowed to promote Democrat insanity with one hand while getting benefits from Republicans with the other. Cotton is exactly right to tell Kroger’s CEO to pound sand. These mega-corporations need to learn a hard lesson, and if that means this merger doesn’t go through, so be it.

#3 – Justice Gorsuch Leaves CO Solicitor General Stammering During Oral Arguments on Religious Liberty — by Bonchie 

Gorsuch actually started things off by correcting the solicitor general’s description of the case, which was satisfying on its own. He then moved to address the Colorado law’s protection of religious liberty, stating with a lot of snark that it’s supposed to do so “in theory.” That lead the solicitor general to make the incredible statement that there had been no instance of the law not respecting religious liberty.

For understandable reasons, Gorsuch wasn’t really interested in hearing such obvious nonsense, noting that Jack Phillips had been put through a re-education program for honoring his religious convictions. That left the solicitor general stammering in an attempt to explain how it wasn’t a re-education program even though its purpose was to re-educate.

#4 – Elon Musk Owns Adam Schiff After He Spreads More Slime — by Nick Arama 

But that’s Schiff — he doesn’t care about the truth, he cares about control, and when it comes to Twitter, that’s slipped out of the left’s hands. That’s what this is about. His comments reveal the way that he thinks the government has any right to dictate to a private business about speech, likely because they had that easy coordination [read: collusion] with Twitter in the past, as we reported.

Schiff didn’t call for “action” before, despite the fact that slurs, porn and child exploitation were rampant on the site before Musk. He didn’t care about the suppression of the truth, like the Hunter Biden laptop story. All that was perfectly fine. This new claim is an excuse to try to somehow drop the hammer on Twitter and bring them into Democratic compliance.

#5 – We Found the Real Dog-Faced Pony Soldier (and I Wish We Hadn’t) — by Nick Arama 

A lot of his timeline was gross and involved perverse pictures that I won’t post. At least one picture was him, partially in his uniform, with his pants down, in his underwear, making a perverse comment. His jacket had “Airborne” on it. He defined himself in his profile as a type of dog, a “fiercely protective Belgian Malinois.” Maybe it’s a problem when you have officers who identify as dogs. Just a thought. But it wasn’t even the mask so much as the perverse nature of the interactions. After people called him out on it, he set his account to private.

What was more troubling than that was that several alleged military men were responding to him in similar masks, some of whom also had concerning timelines, doing disgusting things in their uniforms. I would like to hope this is some weird psyop and the military will tell us this isn’t true.