On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” host and NBC News Senior Business Analyst Stephanie Ruhle said that Democrats struggled to talk about the economy because “telling the truth about a complicated economy” is “Complicated and nuanced.” And “we don’t have one economy” in such a large country and it’s “hard to explain” all of that.

While discussing Democrats in the 2024 election, Ruhle stated, “They didn’t do a great job talking about the economy. You know why? Because telling the truth about a complicated economy, you know what it is? Complicated and nuanced. And in a country of 330 million people, we don’t have one economy, because, for many of us, we had a very strong economic recovery. But, in parts of the country, we absolutely didn’t. And, for decades, people are saying, this country doesn’t work for me, the government doesn’t work for me. And that’s hard to explain.”

She continued, “Donald Trump misrepresented what he was going to do. And here we are, 73 days in, with disaster train. So, what exactly are our Democrats supposed to learn from this? BS the American people? Scream and shout and offer them something you’re not going to deliver on?”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

There’s a battle right now related to religion and Oklahoma schools. Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters is in favor of greater religious expression in the public schools of that state. Others in the “The Sooner State,” including the state attorney general and some confused clergy, oppose what Walters is attempting to do.

Walters wants school children to have access to the Bible and the Ten Commandments in school.

Walters said in reference to Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 Supreme Court decision that threw out school prayer as unconstitutional: “I think they were dead wrong on that. Individuals have the right to express their religious beliefs. That does not stop in a school building,”

Walter also said, “What I’m trying to make sure is our kids understand American history.”

The opposition is claiming that, in effect, Walters wants to “establish religion” in the schools.

But what does our history show?

The First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Historically, this was understood to mean that there would be no established church at the federal level in the United States.

Even at the time the First Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1791, prohibiting a federal church, a handful of states had their own established churches at the state level, and saw no conflict between that and the First Amendment. The last of these to wither away was that of Massachusetts in 1833.

Meanwhile, one of the great legal scholars at Harvard in the 1800s was Joseph Story, who went on to serve as a Justice on the Supreme Court. In 1851, Story wrote a commentary on the Constitution.

Story wrote: “Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the amendment to it now under consideration [the First Amendment], the general if not the universal sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the State so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience and the freedom of religious worship.”

He added, “An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.”

Justice Story continued, “The real object of the First Amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism [Islam] or Judaism or infidelity by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”

In other words, according to a great legal scholar writing fairly close to the founding era, the purpose of the First Amendment was not to banish God from the public arena.

Jumping ahead to the twentieth century, another associate justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, who would go on later to serve as the Chief Justice, wrote this about the founders and the First Amendment:

“The true meaning of the Establishment Clause can only be seen in its history…The Framers intended the Establishment Clause to prohibit the designation of any church as a ‘national’ one. The Clause was also designed to stop the Federal Government from asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others.”

Rehnquist gave an example from the very same men who wrote the First Amendment: “George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of ‘public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.’ History must judge whether it was the Father of his Country in 1789, or a majority of the Court today, which has strayed from the meaning of the Establishment Clause.”

Thankfully, since Rehnquist wrote those words in 1985 in the case of Wallace v. Jaffre, there have been more “originalists” ruling on the high court—adding needed balance to the treatment of Christian expression in the public arena. Nonetheless, the battle for religious liberty is far from over.

As to the current battle, NBC observes: “Whatever happens in the Oklahoma case, more religious rights cases touching upon the establishment clause are on the horizon. Litigation is already underway over a law in Louisiana that would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments. A federal judge blocked the measure.”

Thomas Jefferson is often invoked as effectively the “patron saint” of secularism in the public arena. But even that is a misreading of history. For example, Jefferson wrote, “In the holy cause of freedom…heaven has rewarded us.” And he added, “that it may flow through all times…is my fervent prayer to heaven.”

The founders of America never intended to banish God from the public arena, including the public schools.

Author

Jerry Newcombe

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host.He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). www.djkm.org    Twitter: @newcombejerryWesite: www.jerrynewcombe.com

Deep State Anatomy and Physiology

By Jim Davis

I’ve frequently written about the Democratic Party Deep State (DPDS).

They’re the reverse of the old adage about bringing a knife to a gunfight. They brought an AK-47 to what was once a friendly political wrestling match.

In the days of my youth, Republicans and Democrats respected each other. We had differences of opinion, but we obeyed the law and played by certain unwritten rules. We were able to make solid friendships across the aisle, shake hands and compromise. The Civil War was history, and we were certain it could never happen again.

But the Deep State was already fully formed, in the top-secret smoke-filled rooms of the CIA. It was already staging coups and assassinating hostile politicians around the globe.

The Deep State Assimilates the Democrats

The first American assassination by the Deep State now appears to be President John F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat who would be a Republican by 2025 standards. He swore that he’d take the CIA apart, one piece at a time, and opposed its commitment to sending combat troops to Vietnam.

Weeks later, he paid with his life.

My earliest political memory was watching all that unfold. My parents, involved in the union at work, and both loyal Democrats, had just taught me “a president is like a daddy, but for everybody.”

Like the Star Trek Borg, the Deep State assimilated his party’s leadership. Elements of that party, such as the political machines in Chicago and New York, were already fixing elections and generally viewing the law as an inconvenience before the Deep State absorbed them.

It’s entirely possible that in 1968, the Deep State also assassinated other liberal Democrats who refused to be assimilated: RFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The Democrats were transforming from “the KKK party” to “the BLM party.”

Since then, the DPDS acronym has been 100% accurate. The Deep State and the Democrats are synonymous. The former is a large, controlling subset of the latter.

Most recently, it appears that the DPDS also targeted President Trump once or twice. I find it hard to believe that lone gunmen, with no military background, could come so close to killing a president twice in just a few weeks. Perhaps one of them, but almost certainly not both.

It’s easy to guess the current leadership of the DPDS. Certainly the Obamas, Clintons and Bidens; possibly Dr. Anthony Fauci and Gen. Mark Milley; certainly every attorney general they’ve ever had, who seamlessly transitioned into allied law firms; certainly every press secretary they’ve ever had, who seamlessly transitioned into lucrative jobs in their propaganda bureaus.

Those press secretaries, and the so-called “news media” that assimilated into the Borg, have been essential in spreading DPDS lies — from “that laptop is Russian disinformation” to “COVID vaccines are safe and effective” to “Russia collusion” to “Joe is as sharp as he ever was” — and, most importantly, concealing the awful truth or dismissing it as “right wing conspiracy theories.”

Information technology (IT) has developed into a formidable weapon, for both the DPDS and the brave souls who still dare to oppose it. And occasionally, DPDS minions whose judgment was clouded by drugs and other vices produced catastrophic data breaches, such as Hunter’s laptop.

Along the way, they’ve picked up some not-ready-for-prime-time stooges as window dressing (think of Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and Sam Brinton), who also committed catastrophic errors. Such people are walking examples of the Peter Principle in action: they rose to the level of their incompetence.

And in Kamala’s case, several levels higher — because she’s an attractive woman, because she’s that perfect shade of Obama brown, and because she was Willie Brown’s mistress. In fact, she was his whore. “Prostitution” is defined as exchanging sex for something of value, often involving an older married man and a young, attractive single woman.

As mayor of San Francisco, then Speaker of the California General Assembly, Willie gave Kamala several things of enormous value: a brand new BMW, seats on two state boards of review (combined salary of over $100K, for two teleconferences per month) … and, most importantly, access to his network of powerful cronies and generous donors.

Kamala successfully parlayed all that into the San Francisco district attorney’s office, then the state attorney general’s office, then the Senate, then the vice presidency. She sure knows how to work a room.

Like the home star system of Star Trek’s Borg, the DPDS axis has always been the CIA and, no later than the 1980s, the DNC. It spread into other intelligence agencies, then the DOJ and FBI. By 2024, every federal agency was saturated, from top to bottom, with DPDS operatives.

DPDS Tentacles In Democrat-Controlled States

The DPDS Borg also has a tentacle in every big city political machine and, by extension, it controls their respective states: California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. It should come as no great shock that these five state governments are synonymous with political corruption.

Roughly 60% of the governors and members of Congress who earned felony convictions over the past 60 years have been Democrats from these five states. Do the math. I already did. This concentration of corruption, in one party in just five states, is remarkable.

There have been dozens of them. Almost every year, there are more. The list is too long to print here. They almost make the GOP, and the other 45 states, look as pure as the driven snow.

Then there were lowlifes like Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer. They weren’t convicted of any crimes, but were forced to resign due to sex scandals. Of course, this doesn’t include big-city Democrat mayors, city councilmen, and county board members who were brought down by either felony convictions or sex scandals; or state AGs, such as Eric Schneiderman.

But here we see a medieval English proverb in action: “Kings come and go, but kingmakers stay forever.” At the national level, now that Obama has been term limited out, he’s the kingmaker. Nobody wins the nomination without his endorsement.

As the tentacle in each state became more powerful, locking state government in its iron grip, the title of “most powerful politician” in each state passed from the governor. Governors come and go; but the speaker of the state legislature can serve until he dies — or goes to prison. He’s the kingmaker at the state level.

Mike Madigan of Chicago was the longest-serving speaker of any state legislature in history: 40 years. Convicted on nine corruption charges, he faces a prison sentence sometime this fall.

Sheldon Silver of New York was the Speaker of the New York State Assembly for 21 years. He was also convicted on corruption charges, and died in prison three years ago. 

And then there’s Willie Brown, who was apparently smart enough (and lucky enough) to avoid getting caught unless the judicial system was already in deep-state hands, too. All of them are, or were, most likely star players in the Deep State at the state level.

America Strikes Back; DPDS Has An Achilles Heel

Team Trump is certainly not a perfect team of Avengers striking back at the DPDS Borg. Trump has profound character flaws: not the least among them are his titanic ego, his extensive history of treating women like Kleenex throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, and his tendency to run his mouth in a way that’s easily edited out of context by DPDS propaganda bureaus, as his “very fine people” remark about Charlottesville, falsely portrayed as what it was not, demonstrated.

But it at least appears that he’s stopped “cheating on this wife with the next one” for Melania, and his mouth has evolved into a dangerous weapon. He’s constantly trolling and baiting the Borg and its minions on social media, and in public appearances. As Saul Alinsky observed, the most potent weapon in politics is ridicule.

I’m about 90% sure that the Borg stole the 2020 and 2022 elections. To be perfectly candid, I’m not allowed to discuss the details of how I know. But the timing of the COVID outbreak, the use of widespread mail-in balloting, and electronic voting and tabulation created opportunities for “the Chicago Way.”

My IT skills enable me to research and understand the nuts and bolts of how they probably did it, in some of the big blue cities in states that are otherwise red. Notice how Trump was winning all the swing states when the polls closed, but when you woke up the next morning, “Biden won.” Perhaps at some near-future date, I can make full disclosures.

One of the most encouraging signs is that the few progressive Democrats who have integrity, such as RFK Jr., Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard, have broken free from the Borg and joined Team Trump. The presence of each one speaks volumes: we’re the Good Guys, and the Borg and its minions are the Bad Guys.

The lifeblood of the DPDS Borg is our tax money. Its minions use our tax money against us, evidently laundering billions back to themselves through various channels. Hunter Biden and Sam Bankman-Fried were just two of many conduits.

Musk’s DOGE team has been fantastic, spotting the waste, fraud, greed, graft and corruption. And each of Trump’s Cabinet members, as well as Republicans in Congress, have been brutally effective in chopping it out.

The DPDS Borg also has a serious vulnerability. Its most effective presidential candidates over the past 40 years are now too old, or term-limited out. Michelle Obama could conceivably run, but she’s consistently said she doesn’t want to; her recently launched podcast crashed and burned spectacularly.

In Major League Baseball terms, their starting lineup is gone, and their bench is packed with people who belong in the minor leagues.

Everybody who’s been named by their propaganda minions as a possible 2028 nominee (starting with Kamala and Gavin Newsom) is a sure-fire loser, against any of these three Republicans: Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis and J.D. Vance.

Newsom, in particular, has been severely damaged by the recent California wildfires.

Other writers have remarked that the GOP victory in 2024 was like the successful invasion of Normandy in 1944. Like Hitler’s war machine, the DPDS Borg is still a very dangerous enemy, particularly with those propaganda minions spin-doctoring, distorting and simply lying about everything. But our chances of totally destroying the Borg have improved tremendously.                                          

Jim Davis is an IT specialist and paralegal, with degrees in political science and statistical analysis: the underpinning of all science. His work has appeared in Newsmax and Daily Caller. You can find him as RealProfessor219 on Rumble.

The Trump administration is withholding tens of millions of dollars from Planned Parenthood facilities, according to an exclusive breaking news article published by POLITICO on the evening of Monday, March 31.

According to POLITICO, nine Planned Parenthood state affiliates that receive federal money from the 55-year-old Title X family planning program received a letter on Monday announcing that their funding is being “temporarily withheld” for “possible violations” of federal civil rights law and President Donald Trump’s executive orders — including prohibitions on the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Funding is also being withheld, according to the article, because the organization “overtly encourages illegal aliens to receive care.”

“HHS is giving Planned Parenthood 10 days to provide evidence that it will comply with the Trump administration’s executive orders, and will inform the group after that whether the grants are suspended or terminated,” POLITICO explained.

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told POLITICO that the agency is withholding payments to 16 Title X providers, including the nine Planned Parenthood affiliates, “to ensure these entities are in full compliance with Federal law and applicable grant terms, and to ensure responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”

“Other providers in the federal family planning program received notices late last week, over the weekend and on Monday about their 2025 Title X funding,” the outlet also reported. “Many received less than half of what they requested.”

According to POLITICO, when Trump’s first administration issued rules that banned Title X providers from referring patients for abortions, “more than a dozen grantees who collectively ran more than 900 clinics nationwide quit the Title X program in protest, including 11 state health departments and all participating Planned Parenthood affiliates”.

The Biden administration scrapped Trump’s Title X rule in 2021, but a Planned Parenthood spokesperson told POLITICO that the network has not fully recovered.

“She pointed as evidence to HHS’s most recent audit of the program, from 2023, which found the program served about 2.8 million people — far fewer than the 4 million patients a year it was serving when Trump first took office in 2017,” the article stated.

Joshua Mercer, Catholic Vote

Democrat Delaware Sen. Chris Coons told CNN Monday that the “average middle American” is too dumb to identify Greenland on a world map.

Coons criticized President Donald Trump’s plan to purchase Greenland from Denmark and make it U.S. territory for resource and national security purposes, arguing that the plan will not resonate with the average American because they do not even know where the island is. Trump said no options for acquiring Greenland are off the table, emphasizing that a takeover of the island is a necessity to protect the U.S. against the threat of Russia and China’s increasing influence in the arctic.

“[Trump’s] threatening a NATO ally with military action. It’s insane, it’s unmoored. And we could spend all of our time huffing and puffing about how ridiculous it is, but look, your average Trump voter is laughing at us and saying ‘he’s owning the libs,’ and your average middle American says ‘why are you wasting your time worrying about Greenland, I can’t even find it on a map,’” Coons said. WATCH:

VIDEO AT LINK………………..

Greenland, which is semi-autonomous from Denmark, has not responded well to Trump’s ambition to annex the land. Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a Sunday statement that the U.S. will not take control of the island, while Danish leaders and residents of Greenland have also expressed anger over the president’s suggestion.

Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker during a Saturday interview that there is a “good possibility” that the U.S. could acquire Greenland without military force, though he has not completely ruled it out.

The president stated on Truth Social in December that acquiring Greenland is an “absolute necessity” for the purposes of national security and freedom around the world. The U.S. currently operates Pittufik U.S. Space Base on the island, which contains a radar station that is part of the U.S.’ early warning system for ballistic missiles, according to the Department of Defense.

Vice President J.D. Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance visited Greenland on Friday, where the vice president accused Denmark of not keeping the island safe from the threat of Russia and China and said the U.S. would do a more effective job in carrying out that mission. The Danish foreign minister, who expressed displeasure at Vance’s visit, said Denmark and Greenland are “very much open to discussing” a heightened U.S. military presence on the island.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has threatened to increase his nation’s influence in the arctic, said Friday he is taking Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland “seriously.”

Staff, Daily Caller

Standing up for Tesla isn’t virtue-signaling. It’s just virtue. It’s not about Tesla, the company, or its product. It’s about the creator of Tesla, the man, Elon Musk, and the daring steps he’s taking in a last ditch attempt to save our country and its Bill of Rights from warped totalitarians.

********

I don’t care if Trump’s approval rating is 80, 50 or 20 percent. The government has no right to be bankrupting its people and ruining us all with hyperinflation. Trump is the only available President who won’t censor us, forcibly vax us, confiscate our guns, tax and spend us into oblivion, lock us down, lie to us, treat us like infants or imbeciles and force us to live without fuel or transportation. Supporting Trump over the alternative is not only rational, it’s literally the ONLY thing standing between us and destruction. If Trump’s actual popularity is anything below 95 percent, I am stunned beyond speech.

********

The following is credited to Gary Brefini, on Facebook:

I’m noticing that there are some folks doing some serious whining about the Trump administration. So I thought I’d post some thoughts.

1. Accept the fact that this is the leadership that we (the majority of) working, middle class Americans wanted. We are pulling the economic weight in this country and we are tired of pulling the weight of those that do not contribute.

2. If you haven’t already, get a job. Every business in the country is hiring. And you get paid for the work you do. And the harder you work and the more you learn, the faster you will advance, and the more you will earn. It’s an amazing concept.

3. Understand that if you are a U.S. Citizen, or have already started the legal process to become a U.S. Citizen that you are not going to get deported! I don’t care what your favorite liberal media channel says.

4. Tariffs are a bargaining chip. When you are in business you make deals, and sometimes you have to play hardball. That’s how you get the deals you desire.

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects you from discrimination by age, sex, race, etc. DEI openly violates this. Democrats want you to believe the opposite is true because they value your vote more than your quality of life.

6. It’s not the government’s money, it’s your money. You absolutely should give a damn about how it is spent.

7. We are not the World Bank. If other countries need help they should raise their own finances. I don’t recall receiving any hurricane relief money from India or China.

8. Drill baby, drill. Want to know why? Because we have it. Are electric cars the future? Not in their current form. There is way more oil in the ground than lithium, and guess where most of that is? China. Want food prices to come down? Then energy costs have to come down. And that means oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. Unicorn farts and liberal tears won’t power your car!

9. The economy and the security of the country are far more important than your feelings, get over it.

10. There are men and there are women. Simple as that.

11. Education is to establish a learning core that prepares a child for the real, working world. Anything else is wrong.

12. Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States and he won by a landslide — both the popular vote and the electorial vote. Get over it.

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 French have been here before. In 1804, First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte, the Emmanuel Macron of his day (a short guy married to an older woman), ordered the seizure of a perceived political threat to his regime, the Duc d’Enghien. When Joseph Fouché, Minister of Police, learned that M le Duc had been executed in a moat, he observed, “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est un faute” – it’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake. (The remark is often attributed to Talleyrand, but I incline to Fouché.)

Yet the cynical police chief was wrong: two months later the First Consul made himself Emperor (as Macron is planning to do in late May), and the dead duke was forgotten.

The judicial vaporisation of the Leader of the Opposition is certainly a crime, but will it also prove a mistake? So far, the French media coverage of the republic’s latest “political” developments has been true to form. From France 24:

A French court handed far-right leader Marine Le Pen a five-year ban on running for office on embezzlement charges Monday…

From Le Monde:

Marine Le Pen’s 2027 presidential bid in jeopardy after court bans far-right leader from running in elections

Mme Le Pen has not been banned because she is too “far right”, but because she is too near. She has topped every presidential poll of the last two years, which suggests the real problem for the so-called “mainstream” is that the “far” right isn’t far enough: it occupies an ever increasing chunk of the political spectrum, including on any map of the republic most of the national territory outside a few big Macronist cities. A week ago, Madame hit thirty-seven per cent: if that held on the big day, it would be the best result of any candidate in the first round of any presidential election since 1974.

So a judge removed her from the ballot. As Donald Trump’s enemies see it, the only mistake they made was not gaoling him before the election. The French state has learned from that, and drawn the same conclusion.

A couple of things can be said:

1) No Continental leader worked harder than Marine Le Pen at “de-demonising” her party from the “far right” brand. Which, in her case, included expelling the party’s founder, who happened to be her own father.

And yet they got her anyway.

And so it will go.

2) The cause of her disqualification is not to be taken seriously. The “embezzlement” conviction arises from an European Union practice whose principal purpose – like so much else in the remnants of the west – is as a means of control. The European Parliament pays for its members’ “aides”, who are supposed to work only on Euro-matters. So suppose the head of your national party back in the old country comes into town and you send the aide to meet him at the station and drive him back to the office. In theory, you have committed something capable of being interpreted as a crime – or at least as what American lawyers call “co-mingling”. As Trump learned in the New York courts, there are enough “grey areas” that, when they need to fit you up (as the Brits say), there will always be something.

So this particular “crime” is being almost constantly charged against someone or other according to their political pliability. For example, M Macron’s latest prime minister beat the rap on an identical charge that convicted almost all the chap’s less senior associates. The PM in question – they come and go so fast – is generally agreed to be guilty, and his acquittal is currently being appealed by the prosecutor. But that’s no obstacle to serving as prime minister until his government self-destructs in six weeks or whatever.

Not until now has this pseudo-crime been used to take out the most popular politician in the country. For the first time in the Fifth Republic, the Leader of the Opposition will be placed under an assignation à résidence avec surveillance électronique, or what French law enforcement calls “ARSE”. That’s to say, for two years Marine Le Pen will be under house arrest and forced to wear an ankle bracelet – just like her fellow criminal Adel Kermiche, although in his case the gendarmes turned off the electronic tag for a couple of hours a day to allow M Kermiche a bit of privacy, in the course of which he slaughtered and near-decapitated Père Hamel during Mass. You might conclude that French law enforcement are the real ARSEs, but they’re unlikely to make the same mistake with Mme Le Pen.

She intends to appeal her “conviction”. But legal scholars are now explaining to us, with impressively straight faces, that, thanks to the backlog of cases, any appeal will not be heard for two years, if she’s lucky, and therefore is likely to come too late to restore her to the 2027 presidential ballot. Have leading analysts of the printing industry also explained that, due to the backlog of printing jobs, proofs for the next presidential ballot have to be signed off on by …oh, too late, it was last Thursday.

So, very conveniently, the leading political candidate has now been removed from the election. My friend Tammy Bruce, speaking for the Trump Administration, said:

Exclusion of people from the political process is particularly concerning given the aggressive and corrupt lawfare waged against President Trump here in the United States.

Just so. The right of individuals to offer themselves for election is as basic a prerequisite for democracy as you can get. That applies whether you’re at 51 per cent or 0.51 per cent in the polls. But the establishment’s willingness, from America to Romania, to use judges to take out the leading candidate is especially brazen, and says nothing good about their attitude to government by the people.

Beyond that, the notion that the citizenry has the right to choose its leaders is increasingly qualified: in Germany, a fifth of MPs (from parties with less public support) voted to ban the AfD; while in Italy, the Senate voted to prosecute Matteo Salvini, the deputy PM, for “kidnapping” when he prevented an NGO from rescuing a shipful of migrants. In Romania, the courts annulled last year’s presidential election results – and then, when the ingrate masses refused to get the message, banned the leading candidate, Călin Georgescu. At least, the eminent jurists felt obliged to come up with an explanation for eighty-sixing Mr Georgescu (Russian interference). They provided no explanation at all for banning a second candidate, Diana Șoșoacă, from both last year’s nullified election and this year’s substitute vote.

Sir Keir Stürmer is subtler about these things: he decided to cancel this year’s local elections in nine counties in order to allow for government “reorganisation” in those areas. So no elections will be held until next year, maybe, or even later, if necessary, depending on how thorough all this “reorganisation” is.

Get used to a lot more of this. Has Tony Blair’s chum, that central banker of no fixed abode parachuted into Sussex Drive and just discovering that there are parts of Canada where nobody speaks Canadian, decided that certain problematic ridings could use a little “reorganisation”?

I know some readers dislike the way I always say “as I always say”. Nevertheless, as I always say, our betters are determined that no change can be permitted on anything that matters – not least the surrender of the most agreeable nation states on the planet to the barbarian invasions. The sole purpose of politics is to provide some lame-o dinner-theatre cover for that: Scholz/Merz, Sunak/Starmer, Jeb/Hillary… That’s all the choice anyone needs. The “firewall” against broader choices is increasingly unfeasible, so judges have to be pressed into service to provide a fig-leaf of legitimacy to a rigged system, and the jurists from Bucharest to Washington seem happy to play along. So “government by the people” dwindles down, nation by nation, to government by the permitted people, which is not quite the same thing. One recalls the current US Health Secretary’s late uncle:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

I certainly hope that’s true – because, across the west, the consistent message is: you’re not going to be able to vote your way out of this.

Mark Steyn

This is a little unfair, given the nature of the problem. Patel and Bongino both fail to understand the severity of the compromise underneath them. Hence the “95% honorable” quote by Patel recently (convo with Gowdy). The core issue is that institutional corruption is the status of the FBI. That is challenging to deal with and simply cannot be addressed (in any reasonable timeframe, or effect) from the top of the leadership pyramid. The various downstream field offices of the same institution (there are hundreds) will keep Patel/Bongino flush with busy work and positive investigative outcomes for them to announce on television. [see VA recently]

That approach purposefully satiates a reviewing audience yet leaves the process under them without oversight. Corrupt FBI officials continue operations as needed (influence selling, evidence burying, pay-to-play investigative outcomes, DC monitoring, money laundering, trafficking, drugs and generally willful blindness to their outside group partners) and simultaneously push specific attention-grabbing info up the ladder toward leadership offices in DC. [As decades of top-down corruption took over, it slowly permeated the field offices. Most of the really good FBI officials; those who did not want to follow a path paved with the need to join the internal corruption; took up FBI positions in foreign countries. The good guys, the SME’s are overseas now, having long left the domestic rank and vile behind them.]

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino would likely make excellent FBI special operation compliance officers and internal auditors. That’s where the real impact can be delivered [think Elliot Ness approach]. However, as leaders of the institution, the function of their role – as outwardly prestigious as it might seem, essentially isolates them with busy work. They must assign the role of compliance and audit review below them, to the same internal silo operators who have previously been identified as working within a corrupted institution. You might note that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noticed this need very quickly, because he was/is a subject matter expert in large institutional leadership. Bessent has experience, Patel and Bongino do not. Secretary Bessent hired/promoted/moved the IRS whistleblowers into strategic position; to become the heads of an internal compliance and audit team, reporting almost exclusively to Bessent himself. Bongino and Patel would have been good in similar roles within the FBI organization. However, as heads of the agency they can affect very little operational change. Yes, they can steer the ship, but it is the chief engineer who determines the speed of the vessel. The mechanics within the FBI will simply control the speed and wait out the leadership. Kash and Dan will then play a long game of whac-a-mole, removing each identified agent stalling as they are discovered. This will take more years than they have. Contrast that FBI approach (Patel, saying everyone is awesome) with Treasury (Bessent, saying there’s an institutional problem here), and you will understand the visible absence of accountability. The issue is not Patel or Bongino’s intent or motivation. The problem is their ability. So far, they have not publicly admitted the severity of the corruption they sit atop; let alone announce a plan to deal with it. Ergo the intellectually honest who understand the silo operations, only expect soundbites and pretenses. If the institutional corruption within the FBI was being addressed, we would not need to be told the institutional corruption within the FBI was being addressed. We would be able to visibly see it. Ex. If Treasury was saying 95% of IRS employees were honorable and good, Secretary Bessent would not be removing tens-of-thousands of IRS agents. The FBI reportedly has around 48,000 agents/employees.

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.