Uncharted Territory: Conservatives Face Unprecedented Challenges

In that 1960s version of the original “Star Trek,” James T. Kirk—William Shatner—the captain of the Enterprise, remember, he went out to explore deep outer space. And the mission statement was, in part, “to go boldly where no one else has gone before.” And then, each week, you met weird things that no one had anticipated.

This counterrevolution is sort of like that.

All of the expert opinion hasn’t had a good track record, simply because they tried to apply old logic to new explorations that they weren’t sure what was happening or why they were happening or if they’d ever seen it before.

So, we were supposed to have a recession, a stock market collapse, poor gross domestic product, reduction in income. We didn’t have that, partly because we’ve never seen a tariff applied across the board to countries, especially that were running surpluses with the United States. And apparently, we can lower—and we never thought we could—this $1 trillion deficit.

We don’t know the implications on the budget. We don’t know the implications on the economy. Our secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, has announced that we may have $15 trillion in foreign exchange. We’ve never had anything approaching that number.

What are the economic implications of that, as far as job growth, new factories, new economic activity? We don’t know. We’re all worried that President Donald Trump’s inherited $2 trillion annual budget deficit will not be reduced, at least in the foreseeable future, if not raised by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” But on the other hand, we’ve never seen anybody try to cut $200 billion, which may be actualized at the end of the year, from the federal budget.

Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, thinks there might be $300 billion in additional revenue. You get up to $500 or $600 billion taken away from the deficit and you’re almost, you know, at a $2 trillion—you’re almost over a quarter of the way there.

So, we’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of tariff revenue. We’ve never seen anybody do that with that amount of federal cutting.

As far as the universities, we don’t know what the effect will be of taxing the endowments. Everybody’s shrilling and very shrill and saying, “This is terrible. It’s gonna wreck the universities. We don’t know the effect of reducing the surcharges on federal grants from 50% to 60% down to 15%. We don’t know the effect of saying to the universities, ‘You’re violating the civil rights statutes of the 1960s, and especially, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling by having segregated dorms, segregated safe spaces, segregated affinity graduations.’”

But what if we can’t expect, we can’t anticipate what might happen, and what might happen might be very good?

Maybe if you stop fixating on race, people will get along better. Maybe they’ll assimilate better. Maybe they’ll be integrated if they live together and race is incidental, not essential, to where they sleep every night or where they go on campus. You know, get rid of safe spaces.

Maybe the university will cut the legions of administrators, that big administrative bloat, if they cannot charge the government 55%. Maybe they’ll learn how to run their labs or their computer stations or something on 15%.

Maybe if we tax endowments, the universities will say, “Well, you know, our faculty, we’re 95% left-wing. The curriculum that we impose in the general education is all slanted. Maybe just to restore our tax-exempt status, we should try to be more enlightened, more disinterested.”

And the same thing, finally, on the border. There is no illegal immigration right now. And we were told that was impossible. The experts said, “You have to have comprehensive immigration reform.” But we’ve never tried it before, the way that Donald Trump did.

We’ve never said, “We’re gonna build a wall through the entire border space, from the Gulf to the Pacific.” We’ve never said that we’re going to stop catch and release, together with making people apply for refugee status before they get to the United States. We never said, “If you come across the United States, you will be deported.” We’ve never said, “Here are the incentives for self-deportation.” And a million people took it up.

What am I getting at? On the budget, on the economy, on the universities, on the border—and I could apply this as well to the radical changes in military recruitment, in DEI—no one has ever said, “We’re going to actually do what conservatives and Republicans have promised for a half-century.”

And when you do that, and you actually carry through your promises, you’re in unknown territory, you’re “boldly going where no one has gone before,” and traditional wisdom is not only correct in predicting what will follow.

 

Revenge or Justice?

 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard just released a trove of apparently once-classified documents—with promises of much more to follow.

The new material describes the role of the Obama administration’s intelligence and investigatory directors—purportedly along with former President Barack Obama himself—in undermining the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. In addition, their efforts extended to sabotaging the 2016-2017 presidential transition and, by extension, the first three years of the Trump presidency.

The released documents add some new details to what over the last decade has become accepted knowledge.

Congressional committees, special prosecutors, and the inspectors general had all previously issued reports that largely confirmed the general outlines of the skulduggery that began in 2015-16.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, later aided by the top echelon of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence, sought—falsely—to seed a narrative that Donald Trump had colluded directly with Russia to win unfairly the 2016 election.

When that campaign gambit failed to alter the 2016 results, the Obama administration doubled down during the transition to undermine the incoming Trump presidency.

Next, special counsel Robert Mueller’s “all-star” legal team found no evidence of direct Trump-Putin collusion to hijack the election. But his investigation did sabotage 22 months of Trump’s first term, marked by constant leaks and hysterical rumors that Trump was soon to be convicted and jailed as a “Russian asset.”

By 2020, the frustrated intelligence agencies and former “authorities” now absurdly further lied that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop had “all the earmarks”—once again—of Russian interference.

So, what could be new about Gabbard’s latest release?

One, after the 2016 election of Trump but before his inauguration, Obama convened a strange meeting with his outgoing intelligence and investigatory heads—CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, national security adviser Susan Rice, and a few others.

Contrary to a four-year Democratic Party narrative that “18 intelligence agencies” had long claimed Russian collusion, the top directors apprised Obama that their expert colleagues had found no such evidence of Trump-Putin collusion.

Yet outgoing President Obama allegedly directed them to ignore such an assessment. Instead, they began spreading narratives that President-elect Trump had been colluding with the Russians.

Leaks followed. Media hysteria crested. And soon Mueller and his left-wing “dream team” of lawyers targeted Trump.

Further new information may confirm that Brennan’s CIA—and those he briefed in the Oval Office—had known for some time that the Russians themselves were confused about why they were falsely being accused of colluding with Trump to rig the election.

Of course, Russian operatives, like their Chinese counterparts, often seek to cause havoc in American institutions, such as hacking emails or spreading online disinformation. But they may have been nevertheless curious why Clinton was making such false accusations that they were working directly with Trump, and why the Obama administration was acting upon them.

Obama has now claimed these new charges are outrageous and beneath the dignity of the presidency.

He did not, however, flatly contradict the new information. He should have issued an unambiguous denial that he had never ordered his intelligence chiefs in December 2016 to ignore their associates’ assessments and instead to assume Trump’s collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These sustained efforts of the Clinton campaign, Obama appointees, and ex-intelligence chiefs and their media counterparts between 2015 and 2020 severely undermined the 2016 Trump campaign.

They bushwhacked the 2017 presidential transition.

They hamstrung the Trump presidency.

And they may well have hurt Trump’s 2020 election bid.

Summed up, here is the damage caused by the Trump-Putin collusion lies:

1. They emboldened “experts” in 2020 to again lie blatantly and shamelessly to the American people that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was yet another fake product of Russian interference to help reelect Trump.

2. The media were equally guilty. Journalists partnered with current and ex-Obama appointees by disseminating fake documents like the Steele dossier and working with giants like Twitter and Facebook. During the 2020 campaign, the FBI and social media sought to censor accurate news stories that the laptop was indeed authentic and already verified as such by the FBI.

3. These operations may have had serious consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Dictatorial Russia is an adversary of the U.S.

But by needlessly and falsely claiming that Russia had intervened in two elections directly to partner with Trump, Obama-era officials and Clinton-campaign activists destroyed Trump’s own credibility to sustain a workable relationship with a nuclear Russia.

In addition, the lying and extra-legal operations of the FBI and CIA only further convinced the paranoid Russians that they could not trust the U.S. government—given it had been engaging in the very conspiracy lies that were more akin to its own than America’s.

Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others will likely never face legal consequences for the damage they’ve done to our institutions and foreign policy.

But that does not mean they should be exempt from an ongoing and disinterested effort to find and finally expose the whole truth.

Hunter’s Meltdown Exposes the Biden Machine

 

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I would like to talk a little bit about the strange, bizarre, endless, run-on, crazy interview that Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, gave with Andrew Callaghan, a so-called Generation Z internet influencer.

In this long interview, it was a spirited defense of his father, claiming that he was not demented at all, that he was in full control of his faculties, and he had a wonderful administration, and he was unfortunately aborted, kicked out, deposed by a sinister array of characters, whom he accused of being incompetent.

So he attacked George Clooney, who had written a letter about, in an op-ed about Joe Biden’s cognitive problems. He went after David Axelrod, who was also an advocate of removing Biden and putting in then-Vice President Kamala Harris, said his only claim to fame is he won one election. That’s kind of true, in the case of former President Barack Obama. And as Hunter said, Obama was the reason he was elected, not Axelrod. He went after James Carville. He went after Jake Tapper. He went after the entire Democratic establishment.

But what was very strange about what he did, he revealed himself. He attacked grifters in the Democratic Party that made a lot of money. That’s what he did. He said, “These people were unethical.” That’s what he was.

Remember, he was a tax cheat. He never reported, fully, the income that he made by trading off his father’s name. He never truly gave us the full account of the Biden consortium—what his uncle, aunt, cousins, what they were actually doing to get such an enormous amount of money. He never explained why he accepted a pardon from his father. He never explained why his father actually signed his pardon, in opposition to what he did with everybody else, almost, with an autopen.

And then it got very bizarre. He never mentioned that he had dated his brother’s widow and got her hooked on dangerous drugs. In fact, when he mentioned drugs, I thought he might refer to the cocaine that was found in a mail slot in the West Wing. He didn’t. Instead, he gave a defense of cocaine and suggested it’s not nearly as toxic as alcohol.

When he was asked about the laptop—and remember the laptop was in the possession of the FBI for one year and they authenticated it as genuine, and they knew it was genuine. At the same time, they kept silent when “51 intelligence authorities” lied to the American people. And Joe Biden used that lie in the second debate of the 2020 campaign to say that Donald Trump was lying, that this laptop “had all the earmarks of Russian” information efforts—meaning “disinformation.”

He didn’t mention any of that. In fact, he just said about the laptop—in which he is seen using drugs, he’s in pornographic poses, but most importantly, he references his father as “the big guy” and “the 10% guy,” and he laments that he is the bagman for the family.

It’s very incriminating. But he doesn’t—as he has before—he has never denied that it was his. He never denies it’s his. He just says, “It’s irrelevant. If anybody had a laptop and you looked into it, all kinds of stuff would come out.”

He doesn’t talk about his art, that con where he was doodling and blowing paint on through his nose and then hawking that art to buyers, who wanted influence with his father.

His protestations that his father was heroic, that he was one of the best Democratic senators we’ve had, that his presidency was a smashing success are laughable.

So what am I getting at? What I’m getting at is this: It’s very dangerous to think that for four years we had a president who was mentally challenged, cognitively disabled, suffering dementia. And the close circle around them—whether they were former Obama operatives or Biden senatorial family, or his own real family—that these people were running the country.

And the last year or two, if you look at photographs, videos of Biden giving a speech, Biden traveling, there’s one constant. It’s Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was his eyes and his ears. And he was a close—and maybe the closest—adviser to his father.

And after listening to that video, you can appreciate just how close we came to utter chaos and disruption, that a mentally challenged president and his addicted son had the most power of anybody in the entire world and were running this government with the help of who knows who. We have no idea.

Bottom line, if you listen to even a clip of that interview, it’s frightening that this man was anywhere near the presidency. And how he got near the presidency and how the president was the president is a scandal in itself of historical proportions.

New Details Emerge on Obama’s Role in Russiagate Scandal

 

I’d like to talk about the ongoing melodrama of what former President Barack Obama knew or did not know in his involvement with Russian collusion, the hoax that plagued the Donald Trump 2016 campaign, tried to undermine his transition in 2016 and 2017, and ate up the first 22 months of his presidency in 2017 and 2018, and was found to be completely bogus.

There are three blind mice involved in this tale: John Brennan, the former CIA director; James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence; and James Comey, the former FBI director. And they all have new manifestations of their untruthfulness.

Let’s start with John Brennan. He’s very angry right now because the trove that was released by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard of new documents and investigations may or may not have criminal referrals come out of them, and Attorney General Pam Bondi may file new charges.

The problem that Brennan has is that he went to a meeting and he presented a false picture of CIA assessments.

The so-called CIA heads of various divisions found no Russian collusion. They said to John Brennan, “There’s nothing there that we can see that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.” He rejected that, cherry-picked four or five other analysts, and then presented a false picture to Barack Obama. Or did he? Or did Barack Obama request that he do that? It’ll be “he said, he said,” but it’s more likely that Barack Obama asked John Brennan to come up with the correct CIA assessments.

Sort of like Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police during the Cold War and at the end of World War II. He said, “I have the criminal. You find me the crime.” So: “I have the criminal, Donald Trump. All I need is Russian collusion.” And that was the methodology that they proceeded by.

The problem with Brennan, though, is, in the process of preparing this false assessment, he said again and again, both publicly but also under testimony, he didn’t know anything about the Steele dossier. Didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t read it. It didn’t compute into CIA assessment. That was a lie.

We know now from other testimonies, especially from the trove, that he did draw on the fake Steele dossier. He referenced it to other people.

And the problem with John Brennan is this isn’t the first time he’s misled us. He lied about the Senate staffer computers. That was under oath. He lied, remember, about Predator drones, when he said there was no collateral damage. And remember he lied also as one of the 51 intelligence authorities who tried to float that bogus idea that Hunter Biden’s laptop was cooked up in Russia.

Then we come to James Clapper. He was sitting at this meeting in December of 2016, where he gave a false assessment and he misrepresented what the 18 intelligence agencies under his direction had found.

They had not found Russian collusion, and yet he participated in this. He went so far as later to thanking and giving credit to Barack Obama for demanding that they find Russian collusion. He said, “If he hadn’t have ordered us to do this, we wouldn’t have found it.” I.e., the subtext is, “There was no evidence in our intelligence agency for it, so we concocted it on the directive of Barack Obama.”

But remember, he lied too. He swore under oath to the U.S. Congress that the National Security Agency had never spied on Americans. That was an abject lie. And he was part of the 51 intelligent authorities who also lied to the American people in 2020 on the eve of the second debate when Joe Biden denied that Hunter lied, Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic. He quoted the 51 authorities. The FBI, remember, at that time, had it in its possession and had already authenticated it as genuine.

Then we come to James Comey. He also says that he had really nothing to do with the Steele dossier. The fact is, he was completely acquainted with it. He offered, his FBI offered a million dollars. They were so desperate to validate it. They said to Christopher Steele, “Just give us some proof. We can use this. We’ll give you a million dollars.” He couldn’t even come up with the substantive arguments to corroborate his own dossier, so he didn’t get the million dollars.

More importantly, James Comey has a problem. He leaked, on an FBI device, a conversation he had memorialized to The New York Times via a third party.

James Comey, remember, went before the House Oversight Committee, as I said earlier, and lied 245 times. If you say, “I don’t remember, I don’t recall, I don’t know,”—can you imagine an FBI director with all that knowledge at his fingertips saying, “I don’t remember, I don’t know,” about the most important investigation in recent history?

Let’s sum up these three blind mice. There’s new evidence that Barack Obama asked intelligence, investigatory heads—like John Brennan, like James Clapper and James Comey—to “find me evidence that you haven’t found yet so that we can continue the Russian collusion hoax after it was ineffective in the campaign, Hillary Clinton lost the election. Now we want to sabotage.” This is the subtext of the transition and his presidency. “You go back—we only have a few weeks left, I’m a lame-duck president—and bring me the right assessments.”

And that’s exactly what they did, and that’s why they’re terrified that new information is coming forth that suggests to the American people what they did and how they were culpable.

‘Tough Love’ for Mexico’s President Meddling in US Politics

 

. I’d like to talk about illegal immigration, but specifically about the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum.

She’s been very vocal about U.S. policy toward Mexico. For example, she said she would offer legal counsel to her citizens that were here illegally that were picked up, she thought, unfairly or too violently by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

She also said that the United States had no business taxing remittances—that is money that Mexican nationals here, for the most part illegally, send back to Mexico.

She said, “Do not come into Mexican national ground if you’re going after the cartels.” That’s understandable, but the cartels are going into our ground.

So, what I’m getting at is she’s very, very intrusive in American politics. But here’s the problem: A recent Pew poll, taken just last year, showed a striking asymmetry. Whereas 61% of Mexican citizens have a favorable view of the United States, only 31% of Americans have a favorable view of Mexico.

Now, why is that? Well, Sheinbaum should ask herself that question. First of all, Mexico is running up a $171 billion surplus with us. Remember, it was supposed to be the North American Free Trade Agreement. There wasn’t supposed to be, at least eventually, surpluses or deficits. Canada, the United States, and Mexico were all supposed to trade freely and equitably. That didn’t happen.

Why is Mexico running a $171 billion trade surplus with the United States? Because China is avoiding tariffs by sending products to Mexico, which then Mexico assembles and exports with less duty into the United States. In other words, she’s using a gimmick, as all Mexican presidents have recently, to get around tariffs and to run up surpluses, contrary to the spirit and law of that old agreement.

Second, the cartels are sending fentanyl—but the thing about fentanyl is the raw product comes from China. The Mexican government could stop that. But the raw product comes from China, it’s assembled in Mexican cartel laboratories and factories, and then it’s sent to the United States—but it’s not always sent labeled as fentanyl. It’s labeled as Valium. It’s labeled as Ativan. It’s labeled as Dexedrine. It’s labeled as either illicit or prescription drugs. It contributes to 70,000 or 80,000 deaths per year of Americans, who either commit suicide through it, but the majority just simply overdose.

Mexico knows that. Why don’t they stop it? Because, like the trade surplus, it creates foreign exchange—$20 billion or $30 billion comes into the cartels and is absorbed by the Mexican economy.

Finally, she’s mad about remittances, and the tax on them is really paltry—1% or 2%, we’ll see in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” But there’s a trillion dollars that go out from foreign nationals, for the most part, in the United States all over the world. In the case of Mexico, it’s the largest source of direct foreign exchange, $63 billion.

But here’s the rub. Many of these people sending back that money to Mexico are on local, state, federal entitlements for housing, for food, for education, for health care. In other words, we the taxpayers subsidize illegal aliens so that they can free up cash to send back to people in Mexico in dire poverty that can’t find redress of grievances from Sheinbaum’s own government.

And so, there’s a lot of problems between us and Mexico, and the cure—the solution—is not for her to start editorializing on the shortfalls of American foreign policy toward Mexico or our own domestic policy. I’ve got a better idea.

Sheinbaum, why don’t you do the following? Why don’t you say that Mexican nationals are your citizens? They’re key to your economic growth. You don’t want them to leave your country. You have a new revisionist reform plan that you’re going to offer them social services so that they don’t flee to the United States. You’re going to keep your own people in your own country.

No. 2: You’re gonna forbid the importation, at all cost, of fentanyl into your country, and you’re gonna go after the cartels and shut them down.

No. 3: You’re gonna call up President Donald Trump and you’re gonna say, “In three years, there will be no surplus and no trade deficit on either side. We want to be good neighbors and we want to be equitable.”

And therefore, there would be no need for you to intervene in our politics and lecturing us on what we’re doing wrong and where we are exposed and all of the misdemeanors and felonies you spot in our policy.

Why am I saying that? Because the problem with Mexican-American relationships, as those polls reveal, is on your side.

Don’t run up surpluses by mercantile dealings with an existential enemy of the United States, China. Do not count on American taxpayers to subsidize your own citizens who entered illegally to send back $63 billion to your failing economy. And do not lecture us about the cartels—what we should and should not do about it—when you are enabling them to kill 70,000 Americans as a source of foreign exchange inside Mexico.

That’s tough love, but it’s also honest.