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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Musk Demolishes Media’s Trump-Dictator Fantasy Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/31/musk-demolishes-medias-trump-dictator-fantasy-n4938443

Elon Musk headlined a town hall in Green Bay, Wisc., on Sunday evening, just days before Wisconsin voters decide a pivotal state Supreme Court race. During the event, Musk underscored his opposition to activist judges by signing two $1 million checks to supporters of an online petition against judicial overreach. Wearing a Wisconsin cheesehead, which he later autographed and tossed into the crowd, Musk used the event to highlight the stakes in the election between conservative candidate Brad Schimel and Democrat-backed Susan Crawford.

During his speech, he also sharply criticized the media’s treatment of President Trump, calling out the absurdity of comparisons between Trump and some of history’s most notorious dictators. Musk argued that such hyperbole reveals both a political agenda and a fundamental failure in historical education.

“They’ve called President Trump every name in the book,” Musk said. “I think there was one article that called the president worse than Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin combined.”

Musk dismissed such comparisons as not only ridiculous but also factually indefensible. “Uh, actually, President Trump has not killed anyone,” he said. “In fact, he’s very good at stopping wars — not starting them.”

Musk’s comments reflect a growing frustration with the left-wing media’s efforts to demonize Trump, often with exaggerated and unfounded claims. The idea that leftists could equate Trump with mass-murdering dictators, Musk suggested, exposes a serious lack of historical knowledge among those making these arguments.

Methinks the left doth protest too much Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/methinks-the-left-doth-protest-too-much/

In a letter obtained last week by Israel Insider, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Brian Mast (R-Fla.)—the chairs of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees, respectively—requested of the Jewish Communal Fund, Middle East Dialogue Network, Movement for Quality Government in Israel, PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and Blue and White Future that they “produce all documents and information” about dubious practices vis-à-vis Israel.

The March 26 missive to the heads of the above organizations got right to the point in the first paragraph.

“According to reports, the Biden-Harris administration funneled U.S. taxpayer money to certain Israeli entities with the effect of attempting to undermine Israel’s democratically elected government,” it began, with a footnote referencing two JNS articles—one by Caroline Glick and the other by David Isaac.

The former, published Feb. 17, 2023, showed that the left-wing Israeli NGO, the Movement for Quality Government (MQG), had been receiving money from the U.S. State Department. And it was using the cash, among other things, for “democracy education” in Israeli high schools.

As Glick noted, “Since MQG’s primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it’s fairly clear that when MQG refers to ‘democracy education,’ it doesn’t mean majority rule.”

Isaac’s piece, which appeared on Feb. 18 this year, showed how Elon Musk’s efforts to “expose waste and misuse of funds” by “America’s administrative state” led to the emergence of reports that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had been heavily funding the anti-government judicial-reform protests in Israel.

Trump Starts Undoing JFK’s Worst Mistake

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/01/trump-starts-undoing-jfks-worst-mistake/

While Democrats were busy hyperventilating over the nothingburger “Signal scandal,” President Donald Trump quietly took an action that could do more to drain the swamp – and Democratic Party finances – than any other action he’s taken to date.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that ends collective bargaining rights for most federal workers, a move that “is a magnitude of tenfold on what they’ve done so far on their attack of the federal workforce and the labor movement,” Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, told the Washington Post.

Actually, it is the first step toward righting a wrong committed by President John Kennedy in 1962 when he signed an executive order allowing federal workers the right to collectively bargain. Up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that letting government workers unionize was a terrible idea.

Even the sainted FDR attacked the idea as “unthinkable and intolerable,” saying that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

But Kennedy needed to pay unions back for their crucial support in his narrow election victory and, once he did so, union membership among federal workers soared. In 1978, Congress turned Kennedy’s executive order into law with the Civil Service Reform Act, which had the strong support of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Reflections on the Counter-Revolution in America 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. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/31/reflections-on-the-counter-revolution-in-america/

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.

Judges vs. America: How the Deep State Is Overruling Your Vote The question is simple: Who runs this country—the voters or the judges? by Kevin McCullough

https://www.frontpagemag.com/judges-vs-america-how-the-deep-state-is-overruling-your-vote/

Another day, another judicial blockade. Three more executive orders—each designed to advance the will of the American people—were unceremoniously put on ice by unelected black-robed obstructionists yesterday. That brings the total to 15 since President Trump took office in January 2025. That’s 15 direct assaults on the policies Americans voted for when they rejected the corruption and incompetence of the radical left.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t about “the law,” “checks and balances,” or “democracy” (a term the left constantly redefines). This is about deep-state operatives and activist judges blocking reform, hamstringing the administration’s efforts to clean up the mess left behind by Biden’s regime. The same establishment class that spent four years ignoring open borders, skyrocketing inflation, and a weaponized FBI now insists that every procedural technicality be followed before President Trump can act.

Consider what was just blocked. Among the three executive orders frozen yesterday was one expediting the deportation of violent criminal aliens, another targeting the corruption that allows bureaucrats to profit from their positions, and a third cracking down on federal grants abused by activist organizations masquerading as nonprofits.

Let me repeat that: judges intervened to stop the removal of dangerous criminals, protect corrupt bureaucrats, and ensure taxpayer money keeps flowing to left-wing political groups.

Someone, somewhere, please explain to me what law requires America to fund its own destruction. I’ll wait.

Of course, there is no such law. What we’re seeing is a coordinated legal resistance—engineered by well-funded leftist legal outfits, cheered on by corporate media, and rubber-stamped by judges who treat the Constitution as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. The game is “Lawfare,” an endless stream of lawsuits designed to bog down the administration, tie up policies in court, and hope Trump runs out of time.

Trump-Musk: Revolutionary Method, Restoration Plan by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21511/trump-musk-restoration

The ultimate goal of this new oligarchy is to privatize government, a concept that is anathema to European intellectuals who regard the Hobbesian state as an earthly version of divinity.

To Americans, however, the Leviathan, though accepted as a necessity, has always been regarded as a potential threat to freedoms that their ancestors sought as they fled from European tyrannies.

Whether their restoration scheme works or not remains to be seen. But to question its legitimacy is a sign of sour grapes by European gurus who witness their politically correct world crumbling around them.

“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election, which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.

France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs, as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin, and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The answer to the question may be simple: Trump is doing what he is doing because he promised to do those things and has a contract with the 78 million Americans who voted for him.

It was the woke elites who ‘purged’ America’s museums, not Donald Trump Don’t believe the media hysteria: Trump’s executive order on history and truth deals a welcome blow for sanity. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/29/it-was-the-woke-elites-who-purged-americas-museums-not-donald-trump/

This month’s Doublespeak Award goes to the BBC. President Trump is spearheading a ‘purge’ of America’s top museums, it breathlessly reports. The madman in the White House has instructed the Smithsonian Institution to put back all ‘memorials and statues’ that were ‘improperly removed’ from federal property in recent years, the Beeb says. Hold up. Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but isn’t a purge when you tear monuments down, not when you put them back up?

Yes, a new Orwellian diktat has dropped: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reversing a purge is a purge. What the BBC and others are madly calling Trump’s ‘purge’ is outlined in his latest executive order. It’s titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It ‘targets’ the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees 21 museums in the US, 17 of which are in Washington, DC. It tells the Smithsonian to cut out the ‘anti-American ideology’, resist any exhibitions that ‘divide Americans by race’, and restore monuments that were toppled or hidden away in the service of woke ideology over the past five years.

Shorter version: stop purging. Imagine how drunk on the Kool-Aid of anti-Trumpism you would need to be to describe a plea to museums to stop erasing American history and stop hiding American artefacts as a ‘purge’. The clue is in the name, people: the order is about ‘restoring’ things, not purging them. It says the Smithsonian and its museums were once ‘global icon[s] of cultural achievement’, but of late they’ve fallen under the sway of ‘a divisive, race-centred ideology’ that depicts ‘American and Western values as inherently harmful’. And that stops now, it says.

Come on, this is not a McCarthyite stab at cleansing museums of ‘progressive’ thinking – it’s an effort to reverse the McCarthyism of those woke ideologues who cleansed DC’s wonderful museums of their traditional mission and even of some of their objects.

Urgently Needed: A Trump ‘Manhattan Project’ for Nuclear Fusion Energy to Solve AI’s Approaching Electricity Crisis by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21509/urgently-needed-a-trump-manhattan-project-for

Eighty years ago this summer, the United States would assure its role as a global superpower for generations to come by harnessing its scientific, industrial and military resources under the code name, “The Manhattan Project,” creating a war-winning weapon, the atomic bomb. President Donald Trump now has the means to repeat history by funding a 2025 version of the Manhattan Project that guarantees our access to all the energy we will need to power this century.

To place the challenge in context, the president is no fan of wind turbines. Grounded in the economics of business, he appreciates that the energy rate of return for the enormous investment required to build wind turbines makes little sense. He remains focused on some of America’s greatest energy resources, domestic fossil fuels, making us not only capable of running our economy but independent of foreign crude and those control that spigot.

And yet, there is an energy shortage on our nation’s horizon.

It’s electricity. The necessary power required to run not just artificial intelligence (AI) computers but also propulsion, transportation, military needs, heating, cooling refrigeration, lighting and so on, comes from electrical generating stations — and they are going to be hard-pressed to supply what is needed if the United States is to maintain a lead in this crucial sector. Given that AI is projected to have an impact on everything from future medical breakthroughs to battlefield victories, it is a leadership we dare not give away. However, without American generated electricity – and a lot of it is – the next generation of AI success will belong to a foreign power.

It is best to appreciate the challenge. AI data centers are projected to consume approximately two to three percent of U.S. electrical consumption this year alone, with expectations of continued growth now a given. Future projections can see AI requiring as much as 12% of America’s electrical production.

Several tech companies have already announced plans for AI data centers that would each require hundreds of megawatts of power. These kinds of demands have compelled Microsoft and Constellation Energy to craft plans to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Others are proposing to build new nuclear facilities from scratch to power required AI centers.

Ignore the bluster – Donald Trump is not an imperialist MAGA foreign policy is driven by a haunting sense of America’s vulnerability and decline. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/28/ignore-the-bluster-donald-trump-is-not-an-imperialist/

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.

The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.

Even the name of Trump’s movement, MAGA, says it all. Make America Great Again implies that it is not so great now. Trump’s promised ‘golden age’, if it arrives at all, will be forged in a new mercantilist era that has been gradually embraced as well in Europe and supercharged by China’s drive to world preeminence.

Right now, America looks dominant largely because its traditional competitors – like the UK, Japan and the EU – are all suffering markedly worse economic and demographic crises. By 2050, the populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain are all expected to drop significantly. Even China suffers from a diminishing workforce, an overreliance on manufactured exports, mass alienation among the young and educated, a massive real-estate collapse and capital flight.

However, other nations’ problems do not make America less vulnerable. The US’s own population growth has also slowed, and recent economic trends have mostly benefitted the affluent and those working for the government. The top 10 per cent of all earners now account for half of all spending. This is well above the roughly one-third of three decades ago. Partially this comes as many of the companies historically tied to high wages – US Steel, General Motors, RCA, Xerox, Intel and Boeing – have either disappeared or markedly declined.

Wall Street seems more concerned with making money from China than boosting the American economy. As American Prospect correctly points out, American investors are effectively funding China’s bid to displace the US as the world’s reigning superpower. America’s inability to build things – most notably commercial and military vessels – means that, even in terms of defence, its power is waning.

Trump came to office in large part in reaction to the abandonment of the national interest by the corporate and financial elites. According to one study, the growing trade deficit between the US and China cost us roughly 3.7million American jobs between 2001 and 2018. It was partially because of this abandonment of the working class by the global liberalised economy that Trump was able to win voters in once solidly Democratic industrial states, first in 2016 and then again last year.

Trump’s drive for tariffs makes sense in this light, particularly if the focus is to hurt the EU, where tariffs on US-made cars are four times higher than in the opposite direction. This is also often the case in such things as food, beverages and other agricultural products.

President Trump has called the EU’s trade policies an ‘atrocity’, as he attempts, however clumsily, to get America’s key trade partners to reduce their historically high protective barriers. His threats have also led some manufacturers to scrap plans to move production abroad. Honda has decided not to shift its production of new models to Mexico and has instead opted for Indiana. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and chipmaker TSMC have also been persuaded to invest billions to build new production sites in the US.

Mark Steyn’s Reversal of Fortune By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/mark_steyn_s_reversal_of_fortune.html

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph.  That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.  The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post.

Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term after nine years of litigation) on the grounds that Steyn and Simberg were “independent contractors,” not employees, and they bore no responsibility for the content of the posts.

In February 2024, a District of Columbia jury ordered Steyn to pay one million dollars in punitive damages to Mann.  (Although Steyn’s offense was chiefly to have quoted Simberg, the jury assessed only $1,000 for the latter.)

If Mann was joyous, Steyn was depressed and enraged.  He had spent twelve years in what he described as the “dank, fetid, clogged septic tank of DC justice.”  The case had ruined his finances and, as he often stated, his life.  And at the end, when it finally came to trial, far from being vindicated, he had been slammed with a huge penalty with the potential to destroy the rest of his life, already precarious in the wake of one massive and several lesser heart attacks.  An appeal would entail more years and huge additional legal costs.

Buoyed by the verdict, Mann promised to bring National Review and CEI (as institutions, presumably with deeper pockets) back into the case.  He said he believed that the summary judgment had been “wrongly decided.”  Mann announced, “They’re next.”

One year later, the tables had turned.  To understand what happened, it is necessary to know something of the legal underpinnings of the case.