~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.”

https://0f05e94713078c1f581a93e5eb3078bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-41/html/container.html

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. 

https://0f05e94713078c1f581a93e5eb3078bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-41/html/container.html

“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.

https://e213ac4c7daed37b1c16ad45cde01d03.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-41/html/container.html

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.

https://6efc178662c5e23f8a056e9907a8e8cc.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-41/html/container.html

“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