Munich 1938 Versus Munich 2025

Munich 1938 Versus Munich 2025?

How do you un-do a century-old mistake? Let’s revisit Churchill

Steven F. Hayward, Stevenhayward.Substack 

If we look beyond the drama of last Friday’s Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, we should make out that President Trump is upending more than just Ukraine policy and our NATO commitment. Just as he is seeking to undo the Wilsonian legacy of the administrative state at home, he is also seeking to undo the legacy of Wilsonian internationalism, which has been the default position of both political parties ever since World War II, when Republicans abandoned their skepticism of internationalism and signed up for the Wilsonian vision. That disposition was central to winning the Cold War, but it has been all downhill ever since.

The key questions to ask are whether our Wilsonian internationalism should be regarded as historically contingent (chiefly to the Cold War); to what extent America’s dominant role in world affairs contributed to the enfeeblement of Europe; and whether the Ukraine War can become a turning point to rebalancing responsibility and capacity for Western civilization to survive the century.

Trump’s critics across the political spectrum are charging that his seeming deference to Putin and pressure on Ukraine amounts to the worst Western betrayal or moral failure since the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler without the Czechs being at the table. The lesson from Munich was simple: never again embrace appeasement. The specter of Munich loomed over Western statesmen ever since. Lyndon Johnson, for example, openly told his advisers that if he failed to stand firm in Vietnam it would be “another Munich.” George H.W. Bush thought much the same thing in 1991 in pursuing the first Iraq War.

One person who offers a dissent of sorts from the conventional lesson is Winston Churchill. Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons debate on October 5 blasting the Munich agreement is well known, and rightly celebrated as perhaps his greatest speech ever. It ended with the memorable peroration:

“We have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat. . . [W]e have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; [the people] should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance, and found wanting.’ And do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year, unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

Perhaps something like this will yet be said of Trump’s startling about-face in American policy toward Ukraine and Russia. Already Churchill’s famous remark that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else” is making the rounds.

And yet Churchill strikes a different note when he evaluated the Munich disaster in his World War II memoir, The Gathering Storm. As Churchill often did in his grand narratives, he paused to offer extended reflections on the wider meaning and applicability of the spectacle:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances. The facts may be unknown at the time, and estimates of them must be largely guesswork, coloured by the general feelings and aims of whoever is trying to pronounce. Those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenges come from a foreign Power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances they may be right, not only morally but from a practical standpoint. How many wars have been averted by patience and persisting good will! Religion and virtue alike lend their sanctions to meekness and humility, not only between men but between nations. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! . . . Final judgment upon [the choice for war or peace] can only be recorded by history in relation to the facts of the case as known to the parties at the time, and also as subsequently proved.”

Churchill goes on from here to argue that in the face of uncertainties, the decisive factor that should have tipped Britain and France against appeasement was not fear of weakness or rewarding threats of aggression, but honor; Britain and France should have honored their treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia: “Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and when also the right judgment of the facts at the time would have reinforced its dictates.”

And here, we must say, America’s foreign policy leaders have not held up America’s honor as a factor in foreign policy decisions for decades. How honorable was it for America to encourage the Hungarians to revolt against Soviet rule in 1956, and then not lift a finger to help? Of course, President Eisenhower rightly feared any tangible assistance to the Hungarian rebels risked a nuclear confrontation with the USSR—just as President Trump says that further warfare in Ukraine steadily raises the risk of World War III today.

Needless to say, the word honor doesn’t belong in the same continent with President Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan in 2021—a dishonorable display that surely played a role in Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine fully in 2022. For that matter, the United States pledged to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in 1995 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arms, but it wasn’t a formal treaty, and neither the George W. Bush nor Obama administrations felt duty bound to honor that agreement once Russia started gobbling up bits of Ukraine. (Trump rightly notes that Putin stood still during Trump’s first term.) The United States already had its Munich and Yalta moment with Ukraine, and somehow this is now Trump’s fault?

It was one thing for America to take the pre-eminent role in defending the West in the aftermath of World War II, when the American economy accounted for nearly 50 percent of the world’s total output, against a dangerous foe on the doorstep of prostrate Europe. But by degrees American presumptuousness and hubris abetted the enfeeblement of Europe, both by bigfooting independent European interests and cross-subsidizing their welfare states. When President Eisenhower compelled England, France, and Israel to abandon the assertion of their rights under international law over access to the Suez Canal (which compulsion included a direct U.S. Treasury attack on the British Pound), Europe got the message about who was boss, and the diminution of Britain and France was on. (Paul Johnson argued that Eisenhower’s anger at Britain, France, and Israel was mostly because they acted just weeks ahead of the American presidential election. And yes—note well that Britain and France were once comfortable with a direct alliance with Israel, in stark contrast with today, when the Israeli prime minister who is doing more to defend the West against barbarism than anyone since Churchill faces arrest and extradition to the loathsome International Criminal Court if he steps foot in Britain or France.) From the Suez humiliation at our hands it was a straight line to the 1990s, when Europe was powerless to stop a war in the Balkans, requiring American bombers to come to the rescue.

The grandiosity of America’s foreign policy pretensions have only grown with every passing year. The apotheosis of our foreign elite’s detachment from reality was the $700 million embassy we built in Kabul (the new Baghdad embassy compound cost over $1 billion), a clear indication that the State Department never intended to leave Afghanistan, or believed that a stable regime could take hold without its direct and close supervision. Exactly what long-term interest does America have in Afghanistan that justifies such an extravagant presence—one fecklessly abandoned at that?

It would be one thing if American foreign policy from Wilson to today had America’s honor, not to mention America’s self-interest, as its principal purpose. That view has long been stigmatized at “America First.” The best guide on this through line is the late Angelo Codevilla’s posthumously published final work, America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams. Don’t be fooled by the subtitle; although Codevilla takes his bearings from Adams (most famous for saying that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy; she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own”), the book is a wide-ranging survey of American foreign policy from the founding right up to the present day.

Codevilla reminds us that “Wilson said and believed that America exists for no other purpose than to serve mankind. . . Wilson had wanted to take America into the Great War for reasons that the American people did not share.” It is a straight line from Wilson’s utopian progressivism to George W. Bush’s declaration in his second inaugural address in 2005 that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This is as unconservative an idea as is possible to contrive. It is how you get $700 million embassy compounds in Kabul, while America’s infrastructure lags.

The point is: for a century—or at least since World War II—it hasn’t been enough for America’s foreign policy architects to build robust alliances against armed foes like the Soviet Union, or China today. Instead we have sought to meddle in the affairs of other nations, “because,” Codevilla notes, “it gave them no small professional satisfaction and personal gain.”

Trump’s abrupt repudiation of the whole scene, with all of its defects and hazards, has accomplished overnight what decades of cajoling and ordinary diplomacy has failed to do: force Europeans to get serious about their own defense, and step up with their own plans to end the Ukraine War, rather that give grand speeches while implicitly saying, “Let America do it.”

You know who might approve of Trump’s wrenching reorientation of America foreign policy? Churchill. A little-known statement from Churchill, made to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in 1936, is one of the best repudiations of Wilson and his appalling legacy that one can imagine:

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”*

Walter McDougall asks in a forthcoming book (Gems of American History), “What if the subsequent calamities [of the 20th century] really trace back to 1917 and the foolish American decision to enter the Great War?” McDougall goes on to say that “I predict the Trump phenomenon will be ephemeral because he will prove no more able than Barack Obama to break the spell cast by Woodrow Wilson one hundred years ago.”

Pehaps. But maybe getting out of the Ukraine War with some kind of deal that would be on par with the outcomes of both World Wars (both of which involved unwelcome border adjustments and movements of populations) is the cornerstone for a new era of European stability.

Trump is the anti-Wilson, in every way possible. He’s not into Hegelian historicism or Burkean prudence like Wilson. He is not a conservative; he is a radical. But we have perhaps come to the point where only a radical can deliver the necessary hammer blows to our corrupt and anti-constitutional administrative state as well as our corrupt and counter-productive foreign policy establishment.

This moment is not Munich all over again. It might be the Congress of Vienna, though—if we keep a light hand.

Crisis of the New Order

James Madison and the Crisis of the New Order

Richard Samuelson, Law Liberty 

In his history of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the events that precipitated the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the creation of the New Deal “The Crisis of the Old Order.” Building on the ideas of the earlier Progressive Movement, (FDR ‘s “Commonwealth Club Address” outlining the agenda for his presidency is officially a “Campaign Address On Progressive Government”), Roosevelt led a realignment, and helped to create a new political order under our Constitution. The reelection of Donald Trump signals that we are experiencing the Crisis of Roosevelt’s New Order.

The New Deal marked a turning point in the way our federal government operated. It was, to use Jefferson’s phrase, “a little revolution” in our constitutional order. The Constitution makes the legislature Article I for a reason. From the perspective of the Founding, the essential power of government is legislating, writing the laws under which we all live after we the people, collectively, via our representatives, have discussed and debated what our laws shall be. Given our diversity, we can only be well-represented in such a body. An elected president cannot reflect the diversity of opinions and ways of life in the American republic.

Presidents have always had disproportionate influence in our system. What changed in the last century is that their role in lawmaking has expanded exponentially, or perhaps I should say that lawmaking in the executive branch has expanded exponentially. Nowadays, the vast majority of the legal code under which we live has not been approved by Congress. Obamacare, for example, is roughly 1,000 pages of legislation, followed by many, many more pages of legal code made in the executive branch. A central part of our crisis is that fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to the myths that are necessary to justify that practice.

What Madison Knew

To understand our crisis, it helps to go back to the founding, and then consider how the progressives responded to James Madison’s emphasis on the diffusion of power in our system. Across history, republics tended not to succeed. They also tended to be small regimes, covering not all that much territory. The res-publica was a regime with a thick common culture. Madison found that a large republic, covering an extensive territory, would tend to minimize the danger of majority tyranny by making it less likely that there would be a national majority bent on tyranny or self-dealing. As he put it in Federalist #10, “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” Hence, he concluded, “in the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

There’s a second element that we often forget in Madison’s thinking. Such an extended republic would be a federal republic. Recall that for Madison, “a reliance on the people” is the primary check on bad government. By contrast, checks and balances inside the system were, to him, merely “auxiliary precautions.” Popular control was consistent with the federal aspect of the system. In Federalist #51, he noted that we have “a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will controul each other; at the same time that each will be controuled by itself.” Classically, republics were small, and they governed life intimately. By contrast, the extended republic governed with a much lighter hand. Such a republic did not assume all Americans would share a common way of life in the robust way that is often the case in small communities. Recall that Madison is the author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, protesting overreach by the federal government. In other words, Madison believed that our system only works when the legislative powers of Congress are “few and defined,” as he put it in Federalist #45.

The implication of these elements of Madison’s thought for our situation comes through quite clearly in his “Report of 1800,” his summary report on the political fights of the 1790s. Should federal power increase in a significant way, “one consequence must be, to enlarge the sphere of discretion allotted to the executive magistrate.” Note the echo of his famous language in Federalist #10 in the phrase “enlarge the sphere of executive discretion.” That would, Madison believed, entail the substitution of monarchy for republican government:

This disproportionate increase of prerogative and patronage must, evidently, either enable the chief magistrate of the union, by quiet means, to secure his re-election from time to time, and finally, to regulate the succession as he might please; or, by giving so transcendent an importance to the office, would render the elections to it so violent and corrupt, that the public voice itself might call for an hereditary, in place of an elective succession.

In other words, Madison feared that if we become a national republic rather than a federal or compound republic, the consequence would point toward rule by executive discretion, the antithesis of republican government. The essence of republican government is the active participation of free and equal citizens in managing our own affairs, both as private citizens, and through participation in and management of our government. Across the country, we take on that role primarily through participation in the legislative process at all levels of government via elections.

The Progressive Alternative

The Progressives posited that there was an option unknown to Madison. Thanks to modern social science (the social science PhD was created in the nineteenth century, and brought to the United States largely from Germany after the Civil War), there seemed to be another way to do things. We the people, via our legislature, can remain important, but the real work of writing and enforcing our legal code will be done apolitically, by disinterested, impartial, neutral experts, with tenured civil service jobs.

Experts, not self-interested, amateurish politicians, would decide what health and safety rules to impose, how workers should relate to each other, and how they relate to management, how many guns, or tanks, or ships we need, or how many colleges to have, how to manage federal lands, what the school curriculum should be, how our healthcare system should operate, what departments they ought to have, etc. etc. That would take matters away from the corrupt and corrupting rough and tumble of democratic politics. It would instead be given to apolitical experts who just want to serve the common good. They would have tenured jobs in the government so that they can be free from political control and bias as they go about their job. And, per the Progressives, their job was not political.

Assuming the federal government is too big for the original Madison scheme to manage, we must find new ways to republicanize big government.

The democratic branches would set general goals, and the neutral, scientifically trained experts would merely be filling in the details of policy, details that were nothing by common sense, backed by science. As Woodrow Wilson put it, “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.” And because the work of the administrative state was not political, in the progressives’ view at least, our technocrats would not truly be answerable to the president, for if they were, then one would have precisely the problem that Madison outlined. When the social science PhD was new, as it was in Wilson’s day, this did not seem outlandish to lots of people, and thus was created the administrative state, squaring the circle of democracy and administration by experts.

From the start, some feared that we were constructing an arbitrary government. In the late 1920s, Charles Warren, one of our greatest legal historians, worried about this turn. Warren had worked in the Wilson administration; he was no reactionary standing athwart History. In a 1927 essay he published in the Massachusetts Law Quarterly:

If the bureaucrats are truly disinterested and apolitical and not prone to the kinds of temptations that usually beset men in power, then there is little to worry about when unelected people write our legal code and when the same department enforces that very code. On that “if,” the entire problem turns. And today, outside of people with a strong interest in the old myth of a neutral technocratic class, few believe our civil service is politically neutral or that such a thing is even a practical possibility in many areas of our expanding government. Some of the cognitive dissonance we see in discourse on the center-left is from the effort both to embrace the critique of the myth of neutral expertise, and yet retain the status of technocracy. Recall that “woke” originally meant that one had been awakened to the bias inhering in facially neutral institutions and laws.

The Trump coalition might, in fact, demonstrate that the supposedly “neutral” beliefs of the technocrats are, in fact, the very ones we are fighting about in our democratic politics. Their self-image is probably one of the reasons why the tensions are running so high just now. It is also worth noting that the fewer things technocrats do, the more likely it is that they can stay in areas where their work seems relatively neutral politically. As the scope of government has increased, civil service is more likely to venture into highly contested areas of our public life, and, hence, into areas in which all decisions are recognized as political, even if the bureaucrats are extremely reluctant to recognize that reality. And that is our problem today.

Our Crisis

If we no longer take seriously the proposition that our upper-level bureaucrats can be neutral, apolitical experts because they, in fact, have to make political judgments on a regular basis, then the administrative state is in a crisis of legitimacy. And that is what the re-election of Donald Trump represents. The American people don’t elect him in 2016 and again in 2024 if they believe that our institutions have been behaving in a reasonable and apolitical way.

Progressives react with horror at the possibility of a president truly in charge of today’s massive executive branch. Can one really blame them? One need not be a Progressive ideologue or a member of the technocracy with a strong self-interest in the matter to see why the prospect of a president, even an elected one, with all that power at his discretion is legitimately terrifying. Does anyone really want to give a president all that power? The Founders did expect the president to be in charge of the executive branch, but they did not expect the executive branch to have the kind of power it does today. Yet, is it reasonable to expect that we can reduce that power significantly?

And who else should be in charge once we recognize that there is no such thing as apolitical law writing and policy making? In the Obama era, progressives mocked the citizen who said, “Get your government hands off my Medicare.” Today we see the equivalent on the other side—get the elected president’s hands off my democratic administrative state. How can the president be violating separation of powers when he asserts control over his own branch? How can it be undemocratic for the person we elected to be the person in charge of the bureaucracy? Nowadays, many Americans seem to have concluded that the only thing worse than giving one man, even one we elect, so much power in so many areas of our lives might be to have that power in a class of unelected bureaucrats who cannot be fired, and who are accountable only to themselves. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency project seems to be exposing how the bureaucratic class has gamed the system to help entrench its policy preferences.

One of the policies that triggered the colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution was the British government’s talk of creating a “civil list,” the eighteenth-century version of elite civil service, in the colonies. From the perspective of the king and the aristocrats and gentlemen who governed Britain, the colonies were much too democratic, with the colonial legislatures, among other local institutions, exercising too much power. They were using their power to push around the royal governors. Moreover, the American colonies were, from the perspective of London, lacking in gentlemen who were worthy of political power. Hence came the desire to foster a larger governing class, paid by the King, to help rule the colonies. The colonists, forced to think about it, decided that they liked self-rule. Perhaps our old DNA is kicking in, and we are in the process of rejecting rule by the modern version of the civil list. Our elite bureaucracy is involved in way too many areas of public policy to accept the pretense that they are acting as neutral technicians. That being the case, we the people ought to have a much larger role.

But assuming the federal government is too big for the Madison scheme to manage, we must find new ways to republicanize big government. The progressive politicians who designed the administrative state did not do this then because they subscribed to the myth of scientific expertise; now, though, we recognize that the administrative state is engaged in political, not scientific work.

Reconciling technocracy with republican government is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by our republic. But in order to meet that challenge we must first recognize what it is and introduce what John Adams called “the checks and balances of republican governments” into the administrative state. Is there a way to reconcile checks and balances with technocracy? That is, I suspect, the $64 trillion dollar question. It will not be easy, but we likely have no good alternative if we wish to preserve the republic as a republic for another 250 years. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

MAGA agonistes

 

MAGA agonistes

Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion 

On the new president’s plans.

The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and his eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.

Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, maga policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.

There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.

This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity-politics-obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.

Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural Left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth, and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.

Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the maga agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.

Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual gdp has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border, which for most of Biden’s term was nonexistent. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated twelve million additional unvetted illegal aliens, diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas, and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution in retrospect did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.

Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments have followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.

Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as twelve million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the Left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the twelve million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend into the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.

Second, in the 2024 election, Trump won a record number of Hispanic voters (somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how the term “Hispanic” is defined) in one of the most dramatic political defections from the Democratic Party in history. While voters’ switch to Trump can be largely attributed to the deleterious effects of the Biden-Harris open border on Hispanic communities, schools, and social services, no one knows what, if any, might be the paradoxical political effects of the mass deportation of many within these same Hispanic communities.

Will Hispanic voters continue to resent the ecumenical nature of illegal immigration across the southern border, which now draws millions from outside Latin America? Will they wish to focus primarily on violent criminals while exempting on a case-by-case basis Mexican nationals, many of whom have kinship ties to Hispanic U.S. citizens? In sum, no one yet knows the political consequences of deporting all—or even 5 to 10 percent—of the Biden-era illegal aliens, given their unprecedented numbers. Even if polls tell us that 52 percent of Americans support “massive” deportations, will that number still hold true if they eventually include friends and relatives or entail five or six million deportations?

Trump’s fiscal policies pose similar known unknowns. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a number of large tax cuts to various groups. For example, eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips might cost the treasury in excess of $10 billion a year. Trump’s call to make tax-free the incomes of police officers, firefighters, veterans, and active-duty military personnel would translate into at minimum a shortfall of $200 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Another $200 billion in annual revenue would be lost if, as promised, Trump once again allowed state and local taxes to be deducted from federal income taxes. Some $300 billion per annum would also vanish under Trump’s proposals to cease taxing hourly overtime pay. Other promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, cut corporate taxes to 15 percent, or reextend his 2017 tax cuts could in toto reach $1 trillion in lost federal revenue per year.

The 2024 yearly deficit was projected at about $1.83 trillion. So how would Trump reach his goal of moving toward a balanced budget if all the promised tax reductions were realized, with a yearly loss of at least $1 trillion in revenue added to the nearly $2 trillion currently borrowed each year? No one knows the precise increase in annual revenues that will accrue from greater productivity and economic growth due to Trump’s deregulatory and tax-reduction agendas. Furthermore, how much income can be expected from proposed reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports? And how much will realistically be gained in savings from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency and their promise to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget?

So far, Trump’s proposed radical tax cuts are quite popular, mostly transparent, and often detailed, while the commensurate massive reductions in federal spending are as yet none of the above. The political success of Trump’s tax and spending reductions will hinge on the degree to which he can eliminate massive unpopular waste, slash useless programs, increase federal revenue from targeted foreign tariffs, and through incentives grow the size and incomes of the taxpaying public and corporations—without touching sacrosanct big-ticket items like defense, Social Security, and Medicare. It bears noting that no prior administration has been able to cut the annual defecit while also massively reducing federal income taxes.

Trump has also promised a radically new and different cohort to run his cabinet posts and large agencies. In his first term, Trump’s agenda was stymied by both his own political appointees and the high-ranking officials of the administrative state. Starting in 2017, they saw their new jobs as either warping maga directives into their own preferred policies or colluding to block a supposedly unqualified and indeed “dangerous” Trump. Almost monthly, his cabinet heads or agency directors—John Bolton, James Comey, John Kelly, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Christopher Wray—were at odds with their politically inexperienced president.

Anonymous lower-ranking officials routinely claimed to the media that they were internally frustrating Trump initiatives and leaked embarrassing (and possibly fabricated) anecdotes about their president. One supposedly high-ranking Trump official known as “Anonymous” —later revealed to be a rather low-ranking bureaucrat named Miles Taylor—began a New York Times hit piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He further boasted of how appointees deliberately tried to sabotage Trump policies and executive orders.

But paradoxes also arise from Trump’s 2024 remedies for this earlier internal obstruction. Given this past experience, only genuine outsiders appear immune to the compromises and careerism endemic among veterans of the administrative state. And yet such would-be reformers often lack the insider knowledge, expertise, and familiarity with the government blob needed to reduce or eliminate it.

The radical growth in the federal government, the surge in entitlements, the increases in regulations and taxes, and the soaring deficit and national debt were overseen by so-called experts in the bureaucracy as well as by traditional politicians on both sides of the aisle. In response, would-be reformers have talked grandly about the dangers of unsustainable national debt, the interest payments that now exceed $1 trillion per year, and the need to rein in nearly $2 trillion in annual budget deficits. But few, especially in Congress, may be willing to cancel the sacred-cow programs that have enriched their constituents, provided jobs for millions of Americans, and offered high-paying revolving-door billets for retired politicians and their staffers.

For example, the general public, liberal and conservative alike, acknowledges vast waste and wrongheaded procurement at the Pentagon. Auditors quietly grant that massive subsidies and corporate welfare to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, and crony-capitalist wind- and solar-energy companies are near scandalous. An increasing number of voters now believe that the government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans that are nonperforming, stop funding boondoggles like high-speed rail, and dismantle the vast dei-commissar system at government agencies.

Yet those most familiar with these programs are their beneficiaries. And those who could most effectively discontinue them are precisely those who perhaps could least be trusted to do so. Therefore, outsiders are needed, even or especially those without the degrees and résumés customarily required to run these huge government entities.

Trump’s cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth, for example, a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies, is by conventional standards unqualified to be the defense secretary. He is not a four-star officer, former Fortune 500 ceo, or prior cabinet official. Unlike his two predecessors, however, he would not revolve into the office from a post at a defense corporation with huge Pentagon contracts.

The fbi nominee Kash Patel has a lengthy record of government service in Congress, the executive branch, and legal circles. But he also is a fierce critic of the fbi and was once himself a target of agency monitoring. Indeed, Patel wrote a book about fbi misadventures, incompetence, and political weaponization. He promises to move the agency outside of Washington, D.C., and to end its political contamination—which has earned him fierce opposition from within the bureau and its congressional and media supporters.

In rejection of the Republican establishment that obstructed him in his first administration, Trump has often opted for anti-big-government picks who were once Democrats or who otherwise emphatically reflect the populist nature of the new Republican Party, such as Tulsi Gabbard (National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services), Dr. Marty Makary (Food and Drug Administration), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (National Institutes of Health), or Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Labor).

In sum, while it is not impossible for reformers to emerge from the status quo, it is precisely those “unqualified,” “firebrand,” or “dangerous” outsiders without “proper” experience in government, without prestigious degrees and credentials, and without sober and judicious reputations within the bureaucracies (indeed, they are sometimes the very targets of the agencies that they are tasked to reform or end) who are most immune to being compromised by those bureaucracies.

But it is abroad where the implementation of the maga agenda will be most severely stress-tested, particularly regarding China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Trump’s first term was neither isolationist nor interventionist. He loathed nation-building, but he also ridiculed the appeasement strategies of prior administrations. Recalling the Roman military commentator Vegetius’s famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum (If you desire peace, prepare for war), Trump’s strategy in building up the nation’s defenses and reforming the Pentagon was not to fight elective ground wars or to democratize foreign nations, but to avoid future conflicts through demonstrable deterrence.

A good example is his first-term experience with radical Islamists in the Middle East. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed by drone the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport. Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath. After the Trump cancellation of the Iran deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases in Iraq and Syria—most of which, ironically, Trump himself wished to remove.

A few days after Soleimani’s death, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike of twelve missiles against two U.S. airbases in Iraq, assuming that Trump had no desire for a wider Middle Eastern war. Tehran had supposedly warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks, which killed no Americans. Later reports, however, did suggest that some Americans suffered concussions and that more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed. Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East, while restoring deterrence that prevented, rather than prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, such threading of the deterrence needle may become far more challenging. The world today is far more dangerous than it was when Trump left office in 2021. The U.S. military is far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, dei mandates, and dwindling public confidence. The State Department is far less credible, and America’s enemies have been long nursed on Biden-era appeasement. Four years ago, for example, no one would have dreamed that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would become casualties in a full-scale war on Europe’s doorstep.

Indeed, an inept Biden administration crippled U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters. In March 2021, Chinese diplomats brazenly dressed down newly appointed Biden-administration diplomats in Anchorage without rebuke. The debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the greatest abandonment of U.S. arms and facilities in American military history. Six months later, an observant Vladimir Putin correctly surmised that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would likely face few countermeasures from a now humiliated and unsteady United States.

In late January 2023, the meandering and uninterrupted week-long flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the American homeland seemed to exemplify the general disdain enemies now held for the Biden administration. Indeed, foreign foes assumed that there would be few Western consequences for their aggression, at least during a window of opportunity never before seen—nor likely to be repeated.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists, followed eagerly by a ragtag mob of Gazans, stormed into Israel. They murdered, tortured, raped, or took hostage some 1,200 Israeli victims, sparking a theater-wide war against Israel instigated by Iran and its surrogates.

The serial Houthi attacks on international shipping intensified to such a degree that the Red Sea joined the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean as virtual no-go zones for Western shipping, given the absence of visible American and nato deterrents. By autumn 2024, Iran had launched five hundred missiles, rockets, and drones at the Israeli homeland, with the United States loudly enjoining de-escalation and restraint on our Israeli ally.

By year’s end, tens of thousands of North Korean combat troops were fighting with Russians on the Ukrainian border. And by late 2024, the combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing had passed one million, in the greatest European charnel house since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.

All these foreign wars and quagmires pose dilemmas for maga reformers. Again, Trump was not elected to be a nation-builder, globalist, or neoconservative interventionist. Conversely, he is no isolationist or appeaser, on whose watch the world would continue to descend into the chaos of the past four years. Yet Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such dead-end overseas entanglements, or even the gratuitous use of force that can lead to tit-for-tat entanglements. That caution may obscure his Jacksonian foreign policy and wrongly convince opportunists to test his frequent braggadocio and purported deterrence credentials.

In this regard, Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as vice president and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, along with Tucker Carlson and the once-Democratic pacifist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as close advisors—

coupled with his announcements that the hawkish former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would not be in the administration—may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of a new Trumpian unilateral restraint.

The Republican Party is now the party of peace, and Trump the most reluctant president to spend American blood and treasure abroad in memory. Trump broke with previous Republican interventionism largely because he damned past American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while they distracted from an unsustainable national debt, a nonexistent southern border, and a floundering lower-middle class. Similarly, it is no wonder that the public often sees the use of force abroad as coming at the zero-sum expense of unaddressed American needs at home. Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has disparaged and alienated the working-class recruits who disproportionately sought out combat units and fought and died in far-off Afghanistan and Iraq.

Recently, however, even as President Trump’s inner circle emphasized a stop to endless conflicts, Trump himself in November 2024 warned Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that warning was followed by massive Russian air onslaughts against largely civilian Ukrainian targets—and further threats of tactical nuclear weapons deployed against Ukraine. Trump also instructed Hamas and Hezbollah to cease their wars against Israel, and advised the former to release the hostages, Americans particularly—or else.

Vladimir Putin no doubt took note, but he also may have wished to encourage America’s enemies to test Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home. So, is there a way to square the circle of neither appeasing nor unwisely intervening?

Trump will have to speak softly yet clearly while carrying a club. For the first few months of his tenure, his administration will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, as well as China, North Korea, and Russia, that aggression against U.S. interests will swiftly incur disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions—in order to prevent wider wars that eventually might require the use of much larger forces.

Ukraine is, paradoxically, a case study of both the dangers of American intervention in distant foreign wars and the consequences of being regarded as weak, timid, and unable or unwilling to protect friends and deter enemies. The cauldron on the Ukrainian border, as already noted, has likely already caused between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian casualties, soldiers and civilians alike. There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. And there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior could escalate and lead to wider wars among the world’s nuclear powers. Joe Biden’s post-election decision to allow Ukraine to launch sophisticated American missiles deep into the Russian homeland was met by further Russian warnings of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.

Many on the right wish for Trump immediately to cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that cessation would end any leverage to force Putin to negotiate. They feel the conflict was egged on by a globalist Left, as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. These critics see the war as conducted by a now undemocratic Ukrainian government, without elections, habeas corpus, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has intrigued with the American Left in an election year. Preferring negotiations that might cede Ukrainian territories already occupied by Russia for guarantees of peace, they point to polls revealing that less than half of the Ukrainian people are confident of a full military “victory” that would restore the country’s 1991 borders.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the Right’s weariness with the costs of Ukraine as the long-awaited proof of the Trump–Russia “collusion” unicorn and generally perfidious Trumpian Russophilia. They judge Putin, not China’s imperialist juggernaut, as the real enemy. And they discount the dangers of a new Russia–China–Iran–North Korea axis. To see Ukraine at last defeat Russia, recover all of the Donbas and Crimea, and destroy the Putin dictatorship, they are willing to feed the war with American cash and weapons—again, to the last Ukrainian.

Trump vowed to end the catastrophe within a day by doing what is now taboo—namely, calling up Vladimir Putin and making a deal that would do the seemingly impossible and entice Russia back inside its pre-invasion borders of February 24, 2022, thus preserving a reduced but still autonomous, and even secure, Ukraine. How could Trump pull this off?

Ostensibly, Trump would be following the advice of a growing number of Western diplomats, generals, scholars, and pundits who have reluctantly outlined a general plan to stop the slaughter. But how would the dictator Putin face the Russian people with anything short of an absolute annexation of Ukraine, after wasting a million Russian casualties?

Perhaps, after the deal, Putin could brag to Russians that he institutionalized forever his 2014 annexations of the majority-Russian Donbas and Crimea; that he prevented Ukraine from joining nato on the doorstep of Mother Russia; and that he achieved a strategic coup in uniting Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in a grand new alliance against the West and particularly the United States, with the acquiescence if not support of the nato member Turkey and an ever more sympathetic India.

And what would Ukraine and the West gain from such an example of the Trumpian “art of the deal”? Kyiv might boast that, as the bulwark of Europe, Ukraine heroically saved itself from Russian annexation, as was envisioned by Putin in the 2022 attempt to decapitate Kyiv and absorb the entire country. Ukraine was subsequently armed by the West and fought effectively enough to stymie the Russian juggernaut and humiliate and severely weaken the Russian military—to the benefit of nato and EU nations. Trump might then pull off the agreement if he could further establish a demilitarized zone between the Russian and Ukrainian borders and ensure EU economic help for a Ukraine fully armed to deter an endlessly restless Russian neighbor.

What would be the incentives for such a deal, and would they be contrary to the interests of the American people or antithetical to the views of the new Republican populist-nationalist coalition? First, consider that if Trump were to cut all support for Ukraine, it would likely soon be absorbed by Russia. The maga Right would then be blamed for a humiliation comparable to the Kabul catastrophe. Indeed, the fallout would likely be worse, since the situation in Ukraine, unlike the Afghanistan mess, required only American arms, rather than lives. In contrast, if the conflict grinds on and on, at some point the purportedly humanitarian yet pro-war Left will be permanently stamped as the callous party of unending conflict, and seen as utterly indifferent to the Ukrainian youth consumed to further its endless vendetta against a Russian people who also are worn out by the war.

Both Russia and Ukraine are running out of soldiers, with escalating casualties that will haunt them for years. Russia yearns to be free of sanctions and to sell oil and gas to Europe. The West, and the United States in particular, would like to triangulate with Russia against China and vice versa, in Kissingerian style, and thus avoid any multi-power nuclear standoff.

Trump wants global quiet in order to increase and stockpile American munitions with an emboldened China on the horizon. He will inherit a U.S. military budget dangerously exhausted by wasteful procurement of overpriced systems like the F-22 aircraft and the littoral combat ship, by cuts in training for troops and maintenance of ships, and by massive aid to Ukraine and Israel. Accordingly, Trump prefers allies like Israel that can win with a few billion, rather than those that continue to struggle after receiving $200 billion, as Ukraine has done.

Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it.

The same challenge of forcefully dissuading bullies while avoiding exhausting wars will confront Trump in the Middle East. To restore deterrence, Trump will have to put the Houthis on notice that their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea will earn them something more deleterious than the Biden administration’s passive deflections of shore-to-ship missile attacks. That passivity has so far cost the Unites States about $2 billion in munitions without achieving tangible results.

Iran, of course, is at the nexus of Middle Eastern tensions. Both fear of Tehran’s missiles and the Biden administration’s opposition paralyzed the Abraham Accords. Iran supplies all the terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—that have attacked Israel since Trump’s departure. Accordingly, Trump will likely lift American restraints on Israel, supply the necessary heavy-duty ordnance should it wish to retaliate against Iranian attacks by taking out Iran’s nuclear program and oil-export facilities, and deter Russia and China from intervening to help their client Iran.

In sum, to ensure that there are no theater-wide conflicts in the Middle East, as well as in Eastern Europe and beyond, Trump will have to use disproportionate force to dispel the image of the United States as indifferent to aggression due to fears of costly intervention.

The maga revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.

The failed Biden years—the entrance of twelve million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.

Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own maga agenda.

Sheriff Chad Bianco for CA Governor

Sheriff Chad Bianco

A Republican Trump-supporting sheriff in Riverside County has officially put his name in the California gubernatorial race, becoming the first GOP candidate to enter the Golden State’s 2026 gubernatorial race. 

On Monday, Sheriff Chad Bianco announced the launch of his campaign, hoping to replace Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom — who is term-limited. 

James Meyers, OANN 

BREAKING : Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco officially announces he is running for California Governor for 2026.

He was joined today by state legislators like Leticia Castillo and Bill Essayli,  and many grass root organizers, law enforcement, tribal leaders, and more.

In 2024, Riverside, an inland city in the blue state south of Los Angeles, was won by President Donald Trump by just over one point.

Bianco, 58, declared to hundreds of his supporters in Riverside that the California dream has “turned into a nightmare” for Golden State residents — being hindered by Democrat policies that put more emphasis on criminal reform and climate change than fixing the roads, highways, and growing homelessness problem, as well as putting illegals and drug addicts above hard-working Californians.

“What is it that they have given us?” Bianco said regarding the state’s Democrat leaders. “Rampant crime, higher taxes, the highest cost of living in our nation, tent encampments in every major city, more fentanyl deaths, catastrophic fires, a broken homeowners’ insurance market. … Californians deserve better.”

During his rally, Bianco also noted that he would work to get rid of one state law that protects illegal immigrants from being deported. 

“The best thing would be to completely abolish SB 54 and repeal it because it does absolutely nothing for public safety,” Bianco told Politico. “It does absolutely nothing for immigrant communities. The only thing SB 54 was designed for was to keep criminals from being deported.”

SB-54, which is referred to as the “California Values Act,” prohibits local law enforcement from using its resources for illegal immigration enforcement, with some exceptions. The law has been in effect since January 2018. 

“[I’m] tired of my friends leaving the state. I’m tired of watching my friends’ kids leave this state,” Bianco said, the Times reported.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bianco explained that he purposely did not enforce vaccine mandates for sheriff’s department employees, as he understood that it was an experimental vaccine that was developed in a short time. Bianco also added that he supported Prop 36, which created harsher criminal penalties for theft and fentanyl dealing in the state. 

“We won that fight, and we won it big,” Bianco said, adding that California voters rejected Democrat leaders who “tried their best to keep it off our ballot, to prevent all of you from forcing them to do what was right.”

Previously, the last Republican to become the governor of California was Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who served from 2003- 2011.

A Sobering Munich

A Sobering Munich

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

The last time world leaders tried to obtain European peace in Munich was 1938 and it did not go well.

Back then, a ruthless but beguiling dictator out maneuvered the West who gave the dictator what he wanted while betraying the country that, while outnumbered and outgunned, had the courage and determination to face its attacker.

It was called appeasement and the term of the hour was "Peace in our time."

But all the Munich agreement really accomplished was to start the clock winding down until the ruthless but beguiling dictator started the next war of aggression.

 That ended in World War II.

Ever since, the world has looked upon Munich as the city where dictators humiliated appeasing Western leaders which ensured the future only would be worse.

The lesson: Appeasing only works when the dictator not only feels but fears the other side's strength and the consequences of a double-cross.

But this is NOT America's moment. This is Europe's test.

If Europe cannot stand firm in the face of this crisis then maybe (and tragically) all the critics are right.

Obscene $8M Politico Payoff

Obscene $8M Politico payout just one way feds reward

their lapdog media

Benjamin Weingarten, New York Post 

As the federal government’s outrageous spending draws the Trump administration’s hugely deserved scrutiny, one of this week’s many scandals is that We the Taxpayers have been shelling out millions to buy bureaucrats subscriptions to left-leaning media sources.

Yet as offensive as these expenditures are — and as grotesque as is the appearance of government rewarding its friendly propagandists with our money — it’s just a footnote to a far graver and more consequential scandal: That the feds have showered incalculably greater benefits on de facto regime media outlets by seeking to systematically suppress conservative and independent competitors through the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

To be sure, it’s perverse that (per USASpending.gov), we’ve forked over $8.2 million over the last 12 months across a bevy of agencies — including for pricey premium subscription services — to Politico, the chosen conduit for the notorious letter from 51 former intelligence officials seeking to discredit The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story for the benefit of then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020.

Likewise the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lavished on The New York Times, rewarded with a Pulitzer for unquestioningly printing the leaks and lies fed to it by government officials to spin up the Russiagate hoax .

Same goes for the Associated Press, which raked in more than $600,000 in taxpayer cash over the last year, and well over $10 million from 2021 onward.

Simply put, the American people should not be on the hook for news subscriptions to biased sources, or arguably to any sources at all.

For those in conservative and independent media, these payments to competitors just add insult to injury. 

As has been revealed over the last eight years, the feds have leveraged the power of the government — and hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding — to pressure social-media companies to purge disfavored news and views, and crush the business models of the conservative and independent media companies producing them.

Seeking to cancel en masse competing media companies through censorship, shadow-banning and cutting off the ad revenue that is their lifeblood provided a benefit worth many multiples of the funds taxpayers have been doling out to favored media outlets.

The unspoken quid pro quo is that these outlets will faithfully attack conservative and independent media, serve as witting conduits for government officials to run information operations via leaks and lies and refuse to lay a glove on the political establishment that butters their bread.

On top of all that, for conservative and independent media outlets, sums like the $8 million Politico payout is the cherry on top of this broader government-media scandal.

Meanwhile, Americans are getting a window into USAID’s funding of media entities abroad, sometimes in service of regime-change efforts.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based non-governmental organization, reported that Congress allocated $268,376,000 for 2025 for “training … for 6,200 journalists, assist[ing] 707 non-state news outlets, and support[ing] 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media” to bolster “the free flow of information.”

Beyond the question of whether this work actually serves the national interest, the feds have lost the benefit of the doubt: We cannot assume that such initiatives are all above board, and neither wasteful nor potentially nefarious.

Stories like one recently reported by Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag in the Public substack is one reason they have lost our trust. They found that at least one purportedly independent but actually US government-funded and -directed outlet, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, created critical “research” that was cited in the so-called CIA whistleblower complaint used to generate the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

Sickeningly, it appears our own government used derogatory information generated from a putatively foreign outlet — one allegedly responsible for taking down political figures abroad — to try to topple a duly elected US president here at home.

The fact of the matter is the feds have in myriad ways been monkeying with our First Amendment through co-opting and colluding with friendly media that do its bidding in service of its power.

Trump started to right that wrong with his Day 1 executive order launching a missile at the Censorship-Industrial Complex, prohibiting the government from any further participation.

His orders to freeze the Politico funding, and on Thursday to cut “every single media contract,” represents the next leg of an effort to restore our freedom of speech by further separating the media and the state.

Benjamin Weingarten is a contributor at RealClearInvestigations.

 

Ten Problems with DEI That Frighten the Public

 

Ten Problems with DEI That Frighten the Public

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

The diversity, equity, and inclusion project, often seen as a major element of the so-called “woke” creed along with green fanaticism, keeps popping up as a possible subtext in a variety of recent tragedies.

In the case of the Los Angeles fires, Mayor Karen Bass, who cut the fire department budget, was warned of the mounting fire dangers of the Santa Anna winds and parched brush on surrounding hillsides. No matter—she junketed in Uganda. When furor followed, on cue, her defenders decried a racialist attack on “a black woman.”

Her possible stand-in deputy mayor for “security” was under suspension for allegations that he called in a bomb threat to the Los Angeles city council—a factor mysteriously forgotten.

The fire chief previously was on record mostly for highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running and out of the shop.

One of her deputies had boasted that in emergencies, citizens appreciated most of all that arriving first responders looked like them. (But most people in need worry only whether the first responders seem to know what they are doing.) She further snarked that if women allegedly were not physically able to carry out a man in times of danger, then it was the man’s fault for being in the wrong place.

The Los Angeles water and power czar—culpable for a needlessly dry reservoir that could have provided 117 million gallons to help save Pacific Palisades—was once touted primarily as the first Latina to run such a vital agency. But did that fact matter much to the 18 million people whose very survival depended on deliverable water in the otherwise desert tinderbox of greater Los Angeles?

In all these cases, the point is not necessarily whether the key players who might have prevented the destruction of some 25,000 acres of Los Angeles were selected—or exempted—on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Rather the worry is that in all these cases, those with responsibility for keeping Los Angeles viable, themselves eagerly self-identified first by their race, gender, or sexual orientation—as if this fact alone was synonymous with competence and deference.

In fact, racial or sex identity has nothing to do with whether a water and power director grasped the dangers of a bone-dry but vital reservoir; whether the fire department must know how many fire hydrants remain in working order; or whether a mayor understood that in times of existential danger she must stay on the job and not fly on an optional junket to Africa.

As of yet, we have no idea exactly all the mishaps that caused a horrific air crash at Reagan Airport in Washington. The only clear consensus that has emerged is that the horrific deaths could have been easily preventable—but were not because, in perfect storm fashion, there were multiple system failures. In that sense, both the Los Angeles and Washington, DC, disasters are alike.

When a military helicopter crashes into a passenger jet in Washington, DC, airspace—an area that has not seen such a disaster for 43 years—the likely cause is either wrongly altered protocols or clear human error, or both.

So, it is vital to discover what the causes of the disaster were to prevent such a recurrence. As in the Los Angeles cataclysm, the role of DEI—the method of hiring regulatory agency administrators, air traffic controllers, or pilots on bases other than meritocracy—becomes a legitimate inquiry.

To dispel such worries, authorities must disclose all the facts as they do when there are no controversies over DEI. Yet we never learned the name of the Capitol police officer who fatally shot unarmed Ashli Babbitt for months, nor received evidence of his spotty service record. The same initial hesitation in releasing information marked news about the ship that hit the Francis Scott Bridge near Baltimore and why traffic barriers were not up in the French Quarter before the recent terrorist attack in New Orleans.

In the Washington, DC, crash, two questions arise about the conduct of pilots, air traffic controllers, and the administrators responsible for hiring, staffing, and evaluating such employees.

The first issue is whether hiring, retention, and promotion in the airline industry or the military is not fully meritocratic. That is, were personnel hired on the basis of their exhibited superior education, practical experience, and superb scores on relevant examinations in matters relating to air travel? Or were they instead passed over because of their race, gender, or sexual orientation?

Was the shortage of controllers a direct result not of an unqualified pool of applicants but rather because of racial restrictions place upon it to reduce its size?

Second, were the promoters of DEI confident that they could argue that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were as important criteria for the operation of a complex aircraft system as the past traditional criteria that had qualified air traffic controllers, pilots, and administrators?

Not only did DEI considerations often supersede past traditional meritocratic requirements for employment, but DEI champions had also argued that “diversity” was either as important to, or more important than, traditional hiring and retention evaluations.

The answers to these first two questions make it incumbent to ask further whether DEI played a role in the Washington, D.C., crash, similar to how it may have in the Los Angeles wildfires.

It is not racist, sexist, or homophobic to ask such legitimate questions, especially because advocates themselves so often give more attention and emphasis to their race, gender, and sexual orientation than their assumed impressive expertise, proven experience, and superior education. In other words, had one’s race, sex, or orientation been incidental to employment rather than essential, such questions from the public might never have arisen.

Finally, what are the problems with DEI that have not just lost its support but put fear into the public that, like the Russian commissar system of old, it has the potential to undermine the very sinews of a sophisticated, complex society?

1- DEI is an ideology or a protocol that supersedes disinterred evaluation. In that regard, ironically, it is akin to the era of Jim Crow, when talented in that regard, ironically, it is akin to the era of Jim Crow, when talented individuals were irrationally barred from consideration due to their mere skin color. Like any system that prioritizes identity over merit—whether Marist-Leninist credentials in the old Soviet Union or tribal bias in the contemporary Middle East—a complex society that embraces tribalism inevitably begins to become dysfunctional.

2- DEI does not end at hiring. Rather, once a candidate senses he is employed on the basis of his race, sex, or sexual orientation, then it is natural he must assume such preferences are tenured throughout his career. Thus, he will always be judged by the same criterion that led to his hiring. In other words, DEI is a lifetime contractual agreement, an insurance policy of sorts once DEI credentials are established as preeminent over all others.

3- The advocates of DEI rarely confess that meritocratic criteria have been superseded by considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Instead, to the degree that they claim such criteria are not at odds with meritocracy, they argue that the methods of assessing talent and performance are themselves flawed. Tests then are unsound and systemically biased and therefore largely irrelevant. Few DEI advocates make the argument that diversity is so important that it justifies lowering the traditional standards of competence.

4- Once DEI tribal protocols are established, they are calcified and unchanged. That is when supposed DEI demographics are overrepresented in particular fields such as the postal service or professional sports, then such “disproportionality” is justified on “reparatory” grounds or ironically on merit. If other non-DEI groups, by DEI’s own standards, are deprived of “equity” and “inclusion” or “underrepresented,” it is irrelevant. DEI is, again, a lifetime concession, regardless of changes in status, income, or privilege. An Oprah Winfrey or a Barack Obama—two of the most privileged people on the planet—by virtue of their race, at least as it is defined in the Western world—are permanently deserving of deference.

5- DEI is also ossified in the sense that it makes no allowance for class. Asian Americans, when convenient, can be counted as DEI hires even though, in terms of per capita income, most Asian groups do better than so-called whites. Under DEI, the children of elites like Barack Obama or Hakim Jeffries will always be in need of reparatory consideration but not so the children of those in East Palestine, Ohio.

6- Because DEI is an ideology, a faith-based creed, it does not rely on logic and is thus exempt from charges of irrationality, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. The belief system feels no obligation to defend itself from rational arguments. For example, are not racially separate graduations or safe spaces contrary to the corpus of civil rights legislation of the 1960s? There is no such thing as DEI irony: the system contrived to supposedly remedy the de jure racism of some 60-70 years ago itself hinges on de jure racial fixations as the remedy—now, tomorrow, forever.

7- As in all monolithic dogmas such as Sovietism or Maoism, skeptics, critics, and apostates cannot be tolerated. So, in the case of DEI, logical criticism is preemptively aborted by boilerplate charges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. And the mere accusation is synonymous with conviction, thereby establishing DEI deterrence, under which no one dares to risk cancellation, de-platforming, ostracism, or career suicide by questioning the faith.

8- DEI is also incoherent. It is essentially a reversion to tribalism in which solidarity is predicated on shared race, sex, or sexual orientation, not through individual background, particular economic status, or one’s unique character. No DEI czar knows why in the pre-Obama era, East Asians did not qualify for DEI status, though they seem to now, or when and how the transgendered were suddenly not statistically still traditionally .01 percent of the population but, in some campus surveys, magically became 10-20 percent of polled undergraduates. No one understands what percentage of one’s DNA qualifies for DEI status, only that any system of the past that fixated on ascertaining racial essentialism, such as the one-drop rule of the old South or the multiplicity of racial categories in the former South Africa, or the yellow-star evil of the Third Reich, largely imploded, in part by the weight of its own absurd amorality.

9- DEI never explains the exact individual bereavement that justifies preferentiality. All claims are instead collective. And they are encased in the amber of slavery, Jim Crow, or homophobia or sexism of decades past. Social progress does not exist; the malady is eternal. The candidate for DEI consideration never must ascertain how, when, or where he was subject to serious discrimination or bias. And that may explain all the needed prefix adjectives that have sprouted up to prove these -isms and -ologies exist when they otherwise cannot be detected, such as “systemic,” “implicit,” “insidious,” or “structural” racism rather than just “racism.”

10- DEI never envisions its demise or what follows from it, much less whether there are superior ways to achieve equality of opportunity rather than mandated results. The beneficiaries of DEI seldom ponder its efficacy, much less whether resources would be better allotted to K-12 education during the critical years of development. And they certainly show little concern about those often poorer and more underprivileged who lack the prescribed race, gender, or orientation for special DEI considerations.

In sum, because of these inconsistencies, Donald Trump may well be able to end DEI with a wave of an executive order—simply because its foundations were always built of sand and thus any bold push would knock over the entire shaky edifice.