Trump is racing to dismantle decades of leftist policies, but success hinges on speed, discipline, and the Supreme Court—while facing fierce resistance from entrenched institutions.

When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes.

They had the choice of using American power to restore deterrence by invading belligerents (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan) or targeting enemies without deploying ground troops to change governments.

Republicans could either impose tariffs to ensure trade balances and fair trade or argue that free, even if unfair, trade was in the U.S.’s interest by lowering consumer prices, keeping domestic producers competitive, and assuming foreign subsidies were unsustainable.

They had the choice to either reverse the left-wing domination of culture or moderate its fated influence.

They could have shut down the open border and eliminated illegal immigration or publicly condemned it while tacitly maintaining an influx of hundreds of thousands per year for the corporate world, rather than millions.

In general, no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations. None avoided optional ground wars while solely hitting aggressors from the air. None led a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the left’s long march through our institutions.

Why?

Because to have done so would have constituted a veritable cultural counter-revolution that would incur an unacceptable level of hatred and resistance from the entrenched left—defined by the nexus of the media, bureaucracies, campuses, foundations, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party. The latter were deemed just too formidable—and dangerous—to confront in a single term, if ever.

Or so it was felt by prior Republican administrations. So, most stayed clear and sought to deregulate, cut taxes, keep illegal immigration to about 30,000 or so a month, and use rhetoric to oppose the left’s cultural revolution.

Not so with Trump. The target of four years of lawfare in his wilderness years, he has now become a true counterrevolutionary determined not to slow down the progressive trajectory of the last 60 years but to end it and return the U.S. to the center—at least as now defined by a balanced budget, reciprocal fair trade, full use of all modes of energy, a closed border, legal only immigration, no optional ground wars abroad and a fierce effort to end the woke/DEI/ESG/Green New Deal leftwing orthodoxy.

Will it work?

The left’s revolution had become so deeply institutionalized that the once-bizarre had become the politically correct norm: three, not two, sexes; illegal aliens de facto not different from American citizens; a country without borders; massive debt and trade imbalances propped up for years by near-zero, de facto interest rates; and nation-building abroad as the country’s interior at home was hallowed out.

Trump is currently waging a 360-degree, 24/7 effort to undo at least the last 20 years of the most recent manifestation of the leftist cultural revolution inaugurated by Barack Obama.

Given that war and the economy often determine the legacy of a president’s tenure, Trump’s success or failure will hinge on several factors:

Flooding the Zone – Can he achieve enough massive cuts to the federal workforce and federal spending to realistically project a balanced budget in 2-3 years? Can he use tariffs to adjudicate rough trade parity without panicking Wall Street and reduce our huge trade deficit—while stimulating the economy through increased energy production, some tariff income, massive inflows of foreign capital and private-sector jobs, deregulation, and tax cuts? And in addition, can he end the war in Ukraine while denuclearizing Iran without blowing up the Middle East? The answers remain uncertain because no one has really attempted all of these measures simultaneously.

2) Speed – Speed is of the essence. He must see most of his major counterrevolutionary steps enacted this year while avoiding a recession before the midterms. Otherwise, he may see a new Democratic majority House in 2026 that will do nothing but issue subpoenas, conduct investigations, and impeach him. The Democrats seem to have little desire to offer a comprehensive counter-agenda that would reflect their own ideas on how to achieve balanced budgets, a secure border, a deterrent foreign policy, fair trade, and energy dynamism. For now, bizarrely, these new Jacobins are de facto Trump’s allies by becoming so unhinged, often so repugnant in their smutty rhetoric and street violence, and so angry without constructive alternatives that the counter-revolutionary Trump seems centrist in comparison.

All know that Trump’s agenda of cutting the size of government, balancing the budget, deregulating, achieving trade parity, expanding gas, oil, nuclear, and hydroelectric energy, and leveraging massive foreign investment in the U.S. will soon result in a booming economy. But the question is, how long will the bitter medicine of cutting spending, federal jobs, and the size of government, forcing trade symmetry, and shocking voters with layoffs and deregulation last? Or to put it another way, will the new oncologist be allowed to apply sufficient harsh radiation and chemotherapy to a near-terminal patient to see him recover?

3) The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court must restore our constitutional tripartite government. The court must stop allowing the brazen lower-court judiciary’s hijacking of U.S. foreign policy and national security—and do it within the next month or so. Otherwise, a group of minor federal judges, some 300-400 unelected but cherry-picked liberal appointees, will essentially be running the country. Power has gone to their narcissistic heads, and they grow ever more emboldened as special activist lawyers—funded by foundations and political action committees—send them an endless stream of marching orders and writs. Currently, a once-unknown but now megalomaniac Judge Boasberg believes he is a more powerful adjudicator of U.S. foreign policy and national security than the combined power of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and the President. And he may be right.

4) No Margin of Error – Trump has no margin of error, given thin congressional margins and the left-wing cultural juggernaut.

So far, his nascent counter-revolution has been largely disciplined and well-managed. But he can afford no more avoidable psychodramas like the still inexplicable Signal leak to the likes of a hyper-partisan Jeffrey Goldberg.

Cabinet officials should grow more silent but carry even bigger sticks. The entire messaging of Team Trump must be sober, even tragic, without braggadocio. The latest Fox interview by Brett Baier of a reflective, soft-spoken Elon Musk and his DOGE team did more to win the public over to their thankless but critical task than all the grandstanding on social media or chainsaw theatrics.

They need to remind Americans that the Trump team did not open the border but are now forced to close it if the country is to exist.

The public needs to recall that it is recklessly easy to allow entry to 12 million illegal aliens but almost impossible to find them all in a country of 345 million.

In sum, we are witnessing the greatest effort to reinvent or, rather, restore the U.S. since the first 100 days of FDR’s radical New Deal revolution. It can succeed even against the street theater nihilism, mainstreamed vulgarity, neo-terrorism, lawfare, and the congressional circus arrayed against it.

In general, no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations. None avoided optional ground wars while solely hitting aggressors from the air. None led a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the left’s long march through our institutions.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O’Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. Hanson is also a farmer (growing almonds on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author of the just released New York Times best seller, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, published by Basic Books on May 7, 2024, as well as the recent  The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump, and The Dying Citizen.

Sen. Rand Paul Sunday argued against President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs plan, saying that international trade is vital to the U.S. economy and the established levies have kept world markets secure while keeping the country out of wars. 

“International trade since World War II has made us phenomenally rich,” the Kentucky Republican told radio show host John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC, reported The Hill.

“[Trump] says we’ve been taken advantage of. But I really strongly disagree because trade has made us so rich and really has made the world a better place,” Paul added. “The more we trade … the less we fight.”

Trump has announced sweeping tariffs, including 25% measures on foreign-made cars and auto parts that particularly hit China, Japan, and Canada. 

The president is urging his senior advisers to take on a more aggressive stance on tariffs, and has often called their scheduled enactment on April 2 the nation’s “Liberation Day.”

In recent days, Trump has also returned to the idea of a universal tariff that would be applied to most imports, reports The Washington Post. International leaders, meanwhile, are promising to hit back with reciprocal tariffs. 

Paul said his constituents in Kentucky oppose the looming trade war and that the tariffs will boost prices for consumers and business owners. 

“I live in a state where we have three of the big automobile manufacturers,” the senator said. “They’re all opposed to the tariffs, and I think that it would hurt them. The bourbon industry in Kentucky, they don’t like the tariffs. I’ve got farmers, they don’t like the tariffs. 

“I really don’t have any organized business interests in my state that think they’re a good idea. This is something that I just disagree with President Trump on.”

Other Republicans have spoken out against Trump’s call for higher tariffs. 

“The Canadian tariffs will definitely have a detrimental impact on the economy of Maine and on border communities in particular,” according to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

“We have, for example, a major paper mill in northern Maine right on the border that gets its pulp from Canada,” she added. “That mill alone, which is by far the biggest employer in the region, employs 510 people directly. I’ve talked to the owner of that mill: The imposition of a 25% tariff could be devastating.”

Sandy Fitzgerald ✉

Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics. 

When the media omit the facts that matter most, it’s clear that they are more interested in undermining the Trump administration than informing the public about threats America faces..

The propaganda press continues to play fast and loose with the truth, and nowhere is that more apparent than in their coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to detain yet another terrorist sympathizer living in the United States. This time, it’s Badar Khan Suri, a man with ties to a senior Hamas official — but you wouldn’t necessarily glean that from the deliberately misleading headlines and articles.

“Trump is seeking to deport another academic who is legally in the country, lawsuit says,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein said. Cheney and Gerstein added that Suri “says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage.”

“Suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage” is a rather charitable way of describing the daughter of known Hamas senior adviser Ahmed Yousef.

Suri’s wife is Palestinian-born Mapheze Saleh. Saleh is a student at Georgetown as well as a former writer for Al Jazeera, which peddles Hamas propaganda. Saleh previously worked with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas.

Saleh’s father, Yousef, was a senior adviser to Hamas leadership, according to National Review. A Wikipedia page for Yousef describes him as “‘Hamas’s gate’ to the West because of his extensive connections to Hamas and his years living in the United States.”

Saleh, a U.S. citizen, also posted several pieces of Hamas propaganda on her social media account, including a video that, according to National Review, “claimed Hamas was forced to carry out the attack because Israel is supposedly a ‘fascist occupation state,’ Israel has ‘judized [sic] their Quds’ (an apparent attempt at claiming Jews have ‘Judaized’ Jerusalem), and Jews are trying to build ‘their alleged temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa.’” Saleh also posted “tributes” to several Hamas terrorists, including Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, according to National Review.

Saleh made a post declaring “America is the plague,” according to National Review.

But according to Cheney and Gerstein, “Suri’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, argued in his petition that Suri is being punished because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife — who is a U.S. citizen — and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.”

Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin stated in a post on X, however, that Suri “has close connections to a known or suspected terrorist” and is “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media.” (Federal law prohibits providing “material support or resources” to any designated terrorist organizations.)

That didn’t stop Cheney and Gerstein from pretending that Suri is just “a Georgetown University researcher, who was studying and teaching on a student visa.”

It’s a similar angle taken by The New York Times’ Hank Sanders and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, who described the situation as the government detaining “an Indian citizen who was studying and teaching at Georgetown University.” Not once do Sanders and Kanno-Youngs mention that Suri’s wife posts Hamas propaganda.

NBC News’ Gary Grumbach and Chloe Atkins didn’t mention Suri’s wife, her posts peddling Hamas propaganda, or her father’s involvement with Hamas. As far as NBC News’ readers go, Suri is just a “graduate student from India” whose lawyer says did “nothing wrong.”

In the world of Politico, The New York Times, and NBC News, Suri’s connection to Hamas gets airbrushed out of the picture. Suri is merely a “researcher” and “graduate student” caught up in a legal dispute. The propaganda press frames the story as though the government’s actions are driven by a general opposition to free speech rather than the clear, present danger posed by an individual with ties to a terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of America’s allies and America.

When the media omit the facts that matter most, it’s clear that they are more interested in undermining the Trump administration in the court of public opinion than in informing the public about the very real threats America faces.

Brianna Lyman, The Federalist

When you sit down to write a column and the first word you write nearly breaks the “F” key, then you have to continually erase it, well, it’s a way to tell you’re in a mood. And nothing deserves a “mood” like dealing with the worst creatures on the planet since life crawled out of the primordial ooze: Democrats. 

Hillary Clinton step forward as the person to speak out on this so-called “Signal scandal”? That’s like hiring OJ Simpson to be the spokesmodel for your battered women’s shelter or Bill Clinton to be your marriage counselor. Hell, considering it’s Hillary, it’s like having Jeffrey Epstein run your daycare center. 

That last one doesn’t really hold up since they left Epstein to do pretty much whatever he wanted while he was alive, with them likely in on most, if not all, of it.

While “Big Balls” fights as part of DOGE to save taxpayers billions of dollars from waste, fraud, and abuse, Hillary showed her big balls (is it any wonder Bill isn’t interested?) by writing an op-ed in the New York Times about how disgusted she was that Trump Cabinet officials would have a discussion over an encrypted app.

Of all the people on the left, no one else was available. No one? They had to go with the lady who set up a private, unsecured server to hand every bit of electronic communications she engaged in as Secretary of State – including A LOT of classified material – and hid it all from the government until an outside group discovered it? No one else could have a staffer type up the DNC talking points and pretend to be upset; it had to be Hillary.

Webster Hubbell’s baby momma (Google it) wrote, “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already.”

That she would use the word “hypocrisy” in the first sentence is proof that the real “Big Balls” is going to have to surrender the nickname, and Hillary has to man-spread when she sits. 

Hillary LITERALLY only communicated on a server no one was told about or allowed to see, kept in her house and was wiped clean in an irreversible way so it could never, ever be determined if it had been hacked or not. You don’t pressure wash the inside of your windowless panel van with bleach unless you’re desperately trying to avoid anyone obtaining any evidence of something horrible that happened inside it. You don’t wipe a server for the same reason when simply unplugging it would prevent anyone from accessing the data while preserving it all to comply with the Presidential Records Act.

It wasn’t just the server hypocrisy; it was the policy hypocrisy as well. Big Balls wrote, “In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might, and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power.”

Just as a reminder, the Reverend Doctor Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton Jr. III (why not, considering all the titles leftists have given her) is the person most responsible for the failed state of Libya. Muammar Gaddafi posed no threat to the United States and had given up his weapons of mass destruction voluntarily to the Bush administration. But the Obama regime couldn’t speak out against Iran, with whom they were desperate to make a nuclear deal, but couldn’t sit silent either. So they went after Libya, bombing it and helping radicals depose Gaddafi.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary famously said. And it’s true. But what came next was a failed state where terrorists rule, and open-air slave markets flourish. Democrats always leave that part out of their parade program – that they are responsible for the return of slavery to parts of Africa. 

The last thing the world needs is any input from Big Balls Clinton or any of her defenders. A lot has been made about the murder of a family, including seven children, in Afghanistan as a “response” to their failures to protect our troops at Abbey Gate, the negligence that led to 13 American deaths. Still, failure wasn’t new to Democrats in 2021. They have a long, storied history of failure, of getting Americans and other people killed (foreign and domestic – remember Laken Riley et. al.) and pretending it didn’t happen. Never let them forget. 

Hillary and all of her ilk can go straight to hell.

Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.

Since President Trump came to office the second time, egg prices (which had been skyrocketing) have plunged.

It’s universal: When you increase supply relative to demand, prices go down. A free market usually does this, over time. A corrupt fascist and socialist government, the Biden regime, kept the supply of eggs low for political and crony rewarding reasons. They did this with fossil fuels, too. Lesson: Get government OUT of the market, and America will soar even more than it already has. And keep the socialists out of power FOREVER.

*******

Seattle councilmember Rob Saka introduced a resolution to completely cut ties with any commitments to defund the police.

After the murder of unarmed Minneapolis resident George Floyd in 2020, the slogan and movement to “Defund the Police” swept the country. Yet in the wake of a reported rise in crime in multiple cities across the country, politicians, even in Democratic Party strongholds, have sought to distance themselves from the idea.

On Tuesday, Saka spoke with fellow members of Seattle City Council’s public safety committee about his recently introduced Resolution 32167, which recognizes work to improve public safety. These measures include appreciation for first responders, consent decree progress, police accountability, a diversified public safety response, and reversing “defund” commitments.

The councilmember summarized, “This resolution reverses any prior commitment or pledge by past councils to defund or abolish the police. We know that these statements were routinely cited by departing police personnel as a reason for leaving. We also know that they are very divisive.” [Fox News 3-29-25]

So the leftists in crime-laden Seattle want to reverse and renounce “Defund the Police.” They care more about holding power than their principles. Yet their “principles” were based on savagery, insanity and injustice to victims of crime. More evidence that there is nothing whatsoever redeemable about leftism and the Democratic Party. They belong on the ash heap of history. If Seattle voters had brains, they would throw every Democrat out of office and replace them with Republicans and libertarians. I will not hold my breath.

*******

The governor of Hawaii has wished violence on RFK, Jr., for his policies in the Trump administration. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a leftist Democrat from Texas, has told Democrat voters to punch Trump supporters.

Why are Democrats so fixated on violence as the solution to everything? Because they are totalitarians. Because coercion is what they seek to impose on all human beings, globally. They wish to kill people who stand in their way. These are not your daddy’s Democrats. They are dangerous, and should not be permitted to hold power. Socialism, Communism and fascism are not our system, and are not supposed to be our way of life, not in America.

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on X at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, @DrHurd on TruthSocial. Dr. Hurd is also now a Newsmax Insider!

The last, best hope …

By Eric Utter

We in the U.S. are living in the last, best hope — and have recently been divinely provided with the last, best chance.

If we can’t make good on this chance, there is unlikely to be another … and hope will slip away with it.

This is entirely possible, if not overwhelmingly likely. It is up to us to make certain that hope — and this republic — does not die. We must act with courage, decisiveness, and passion.

The rest of the West is in a similar situation but is even further down the rabbit hole. Western nations can continue on the same course of globalism, wokeism, leftism, societal self-hatred, and hyper-tolerance of a rapidly growing Muslim community that wants to subsume them — or they can remember who they were and what they once stood for, recover their self-confidence and dignity, and try to preserve themselves.

That’s it. There is no “third way.” In a nutshell: sink or swim. Sadly and bizarrely, it appears they will choose the former.

In 1940, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, alone and facing the full might of the Nazi war machine, proclaimed, “We shall never surrender!”

Tragically, it appears that the nation he once proudly led has already done so. Ditto for much of the rest of Europe — or should I say the European Union — an entity created in part to harness individual nations’ political and economic might, enhance the security of its member states, and rival 

It is embarrassing to say the least that the EU — today — cannot even protect its citizens from rampant stabbings … or its young girls from rape gangs.

If you look at vast swaths of many European cities, it is hard not to think that Europe itself has been raped and deflowered.

The following is Dr. Hurd’s latest Newsmax Insider column:

For quite sometime, we’ve heard much about “America First,” specifically about what it’s purported, if not outright alleged, to be.

To begin with, “America First” isn’t racist and it certainly doesn’t represent nationalism.

The United States remains first because we are the first country in human history to be based on the sovereignty of the individual over the state.

In the proper America, the government exists to serve the people and, above all, to uphold the rights of the individual. No other nation in history has ever achieved this.

No other nation ever attempted it. This is what makes America great.

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement comes closer to rejuvenating this principle than anything else in America today.

Democrats have become corruptible, irrational, and totalitarian.

Yet, today’s GOP, by and large, seems to be comprised of hapless, bought-and-sold sycophants.

“America First” means: America is superior.

Not because of any particular race or national origin, but because America was the first system in human history to establish a social structure of liberty compatible with human nature and human potential.

Leftists and some fake Republicans speak as if America were based on the principle of altruism, self-sacrifice and giving, rather than independence, individual rights and freedom.

• Is giving the essence of what makes a human being moral?
• Or are achievement and productivity at the root of morality?

America was always the land of opportunity.

To this day, the appeal to many legitimate, legal immigrants is that sense of opportunity.

• Why does opportunity matter?
• What makes it worthwhile?

It’s worthwhile because it embodies the ability to achieve.

Achievement implies keeping what you legitimately earn.

And yes, you’re free to give some of it away; but that’s up to you.

People didn’t rush to the United States so they could achieve great things and then be forced to give it all away through taxes, illegal wealth redistribution, and inflation.

It’s true that people who enjoy freedom and liberty do accomplish the most, and those who accomplish the most are usually the most generous.

But if you don’t leave people free to produce and achieve, they are not able to work for and earn the wealth that all our (albeit rich) left celebrities so detest in the hands of those who earned it.

Ditto for foreign policy.

The basic issue in foreign policy is whether (or not!) we are the world’s keeper, or policeman.

I say we’re neither!

Many Americans agree, although most are afraid to say it because they fear the opinions of others and don’t want to seem “selfish.”

Pre-Trump conservatives (aside from President Ronald Reagan) and literally all on the left strive to appear selfless.

But . . . look closely: they are definitely not that way in their own private lives, but they expect foreign and economic policy to be conducted on that premise (while enriching themselves in the process).

That’s why, as Trump said in his first and third campaigns, America is continuously losing.

All we do is sacrifice and give up, instead of asserting what’s legitimately ours.

The good news is that America is not doomed, which also means none of us are doomed to anything. Nothing — good or bad — is inevitable, not without our choice.

In terms of America’s present crisis, we have a choice.

We can (like our Founders) choose liberty, freedom, rationality, and common sense, or we can choose brazen irrationality, nihilism, totalitarianism, barbarism and anarchy.

At no time in America’s history has the choice ever been clearer. Given the stark choice offered in the 2024 election, we know where most Americans stand on this issue.

Keep that in mind as the media, the “elites” and the supposed “cultural icons” continue to riotously tear President Trump apart in the coming weeks and months.

Societies have choices, just like individuals have choices.

Sometimes a society, like an individual, reaches a crucial crossroads.

We’re unquestionably at one now.

The choice to be free, and to embrace the self-responsibility and need for rationality that freedom requires, will always exist.

America is no longer at war with an external enemy.

We have external enemies, for sure, but it has become painfully obvious that the strongest enemy is our own government, along with its mouthpieces in colleges, the corrupt media, universities and other government-funded monstrosities.

That government, as we know it, is no friend of the individual.

America is at war with itself.

Those are the worst kinds of conflicts.

The fate of the entire world depends on the outcome.

The fate of President Trump is now everyone’s fate, like it or not.

Why?

Because he’s the last man standing for freedom in America and, by extension, the world.

So why is America first? I’ll say it again: Freedom. It’s the reason America was always first, and, if our enemy within is conquered, always will be.

FIND ALL OF DR. HURD’S NEWSMAX ARTICLES HERE!

Follow Dr. Hurd on Facebook. Search under “Michael Hurd” (Charleston SC). Get up-to-the-minute postings, recommended articles and links, and engage in back-and-forth discussion with Dr. Hurd on topics of interest. Also follow Dr. Hurd on X at @MichaelJHurd1, drmichaelhurd on Instagram, @DrHurd on TruthSocial.

President Donald Trump on Friday said “bad, bad things will happen to Iran” if the Middle Eastern country continues down the path to developing nuclear weapons.

Trump addressed Iran while taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office after swearing in Alina Habba as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

“Iran is very high on my list of things to watch,” Trump said. “As you probably know, I sent them a letter just recently and I said, ‘You’re going to have to make a decision one way or the other.’ And we’re going to either have to talk and talk it out or very bad things are going to happen to Iran, and I don’t want that to happen.

“My big preference is we work it out with Iran. But if we don’t work it out, bad, bad things are going to happen to Iran.”

Trump’s answer came being asked about Iranian-made drones being used by Russia to attack Ukraine.

Charlie McCarthy ✉

Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.

© 2025 Newsmax

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

READING

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

WRITING

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

You probably think that’s satire. Either that, or it looks like this:

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this, Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.

That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.

MATH

I’m less informed to speak out on this one, but my math prof friends tell me that their students are increasingly less capable and less willing to put in the effort. As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer hard problems. When I was a first semester freshman (at a private SLAC, yes, but it wasn’t CalTech) I took Calculus 1. Second semester I took Calculus 2. I don’t think pre-calculus was even a thing back then. Now apparently pre-calc counts as an advanced content course. My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.

Symbolic Logic was a requirement when I was a grad student. The course was a cross-listed upper-division undergrad/grad class. Jaegwon Kim taught the course, and our sole textbook was W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic, which we worked through in its entirety. I think we spent two weeks on propositional logic before moving on to the predicate calculus. We proved compactness, soundness, and completeness, and probably some other theorems I forget. There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class.

WHAT’S CHANGED

The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.

What has changed exactly?

• Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”
• Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”
• They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting their phone fix.
• They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine. I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class.
• Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.
• Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.
• It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

Thanks for reading Scriptorium Philosophia! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Funny point, but we musn’t underestimate leftists. They are lunatics, but they still have the media, the schools, the still existing Deep State, much of the corporate and entertainment world, and lots of delusional faux self-confidence. Trump can’t save us from everything, and the battles will go beyond his one remaining term in office. We all must be prepared to defeat the left decisively, and permanently. They are bullies, and if all the people who voted for Trump stand up to them, they will melt away like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz.

*******

Leftist M.O.:

Decide how you want to control others.

Accuse Trump of wanting to control others the way YOU actually want to control others.

Seize control from Trump and proceed to do all the things you accused Trump of doing, that he never did — and proceed to do those things yourself.
This was how it played out from 2017 to 2021. Then, in 2024, thanks to the overconfident cackling Kamala, they lost control again.

Leftists are seeking to repeat this cycle. With one difference: from 2021-2025 they went 80-90 percent of the way. The ones prepared to defeat Trump or his MAGA movement this time intend to go ALL THE WAY. We cannot let them do that. If they succeed, they will set not just America but all of human liberty and rationality on fire.

We have to fight and win this like a war — because it is a war.

*******

Judge Boasberg: An American dictator, with none of the risks that even normal dictators take on. This leftist twit has it far too easy for all the unlawful power he has seized. He sees himself as not only on an equal par with the elected U.S. President and the whole Supreme Court, but above all of them. This simply cannot be allowed to stand. For the same reasons an invasion of the United States or a bombing of our cities would not be allowed to stand.

Defund his court, and endeavor to impeach him, but those things will take time and time is running out for our republic. Arrest him, lock him up, deport him, make an example of the lawless, tyrannical creep, stop him by whatever means are required–and ditto for the rest of the Soros-Obama-Biden anti-liberty, explicitly anti-Constitutional rodents masquerading as judges. Enough is enough, and it’s now or never for America.

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