General

Trump Shows His Pro-Israel Bona Fides

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The Israeli right has often advocated resettling the Palestinians elsewhere. If it happens, it would be permanent. And Trump is supplying 2000-lb. bombs that the Biden administration was delaying. From JTA:

Trump says he is pressing leaders of Arab nations to take in Gaza Palestinians

Trump said he had already pressed Jordan to accept Gazans and would do the same with Egypt.

Palestinians walk along destroyed houses at the Shaboura area in the center of Rafah, days into the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Jan 24, 2025.(Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa via Getty Images)
By Philissa Cramer 

President Donald Trump says he has asked Jordan to accept Palestinians from Gaza and plans to press Egypt to do the same.

Trump said he spoke to Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Saturday, five days after being inaugurated for his second term and six days into a ceasefire that he pressed for in the Israel-Hamas war.

“I said to him I’d love you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess. I’d like him to take people,” Trump told reporters Saturday night aboard Air Force One following a rally in Las Vegas. Calling Gaza “literally a demolition site right now,” he added, “I’d like Egypt to take people.”

While millions of Palestinian refugees have lived in Jordan since Israel’s founding in 1948, Arab states have since been resistant to accepting Palestinian refugees out of concern that doing so would aid ethnic cleansing and undercut pressure for Palestinian statehood.

Asked whether he envisioned such a move as temporary, Trump said, “It could be temporary, could be permanent.”

Trump did not say how Jordan’s Abdullah responded. Just days after the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by Hamas that launched the war, the king said, “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.”

Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, said the same thing at the time. Trump said he planned to speak to Sisi on Sunday.

Egypt and Jordan both have peace agreements with Israel. During his first term, Trump brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab nations, and he is seen as eager to strike a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“People are dying there,” Trump said about Gaza. “So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”

Reconstruction of Gaza would begin under the third and final phase of the current ceasefire, which is less than a week into its six-week first phase.

Reversing Biden’s pause, Trump to deliver 2,000-pound bombs to Israel

The decision removes a hold Joe Biden had placed on the bombs due to concerns about the way Israel would use them.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu participate in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, Sept. 15, 2020. (Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images)
By Ben Sales 

President Donald Trump will allow the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, removing a hold his predecessor, Joe Biden, had placed on the ordnance.

The change comes during a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that Trump played a key role in brokering. In the days since he took office, Trump has sent mixed signals about how active he’ll be in advancing the ceasefire agreement, some of which has yet to be negotiated.

Biden had blocked the delivery of the bombs due to concerns surrounding Israel’s invasion of the city of Rafah in Gaza. While the Biden administration said those were the only bombs it did not give Israel, Biden’s pro-Israel critics — including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — pointed to the holdup as evidence that the administration was not fully supportive of Israel.

Netanyahu also suggested the White House was blocking other weapons shipments, which administration officials denied.

“A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are now on their way!” Trump posted on his social network.

The delivery of the bombs marks at least the second time this week Trump has reversed a Biden policy on Israel. In an executive order on Inauguration Day, he also removed the sanctions Biden had placed on extremist Israeli settlers.

Trump’s 2025 Inauguration

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The crazies are out in force.

Produced by Ford Fischer / News2Share with additional footage by TJ Jones and Will Allen-DuPraw for Activism Uncensored, a Collaboration with The Racket.

David Brooks: Donald Trump’s Nineteenth-Century American Mindset — Optimistic, Confident, Risk-taking

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I liked Brooks description of 19th-century America and I agree that Trump would like to get back to that mindset:

It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. …

Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness.

This jibes with Ed Dutton’s featured article. Americans have become risk-averse at least partly because of the rise of women to positions of power, but also, like the nineteenth-century Brahmins, people like Brooks are opposed to rocking the boat because they are ensconced in the elite. Thus he hates the disruption threatened by Trump 2.0 and predicts disastrous results.

Of course, what Brooks doesn’t like is that

Today’s populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean but at the American ones on the east and west coasts. Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.

Of course, east and west coast establishments are decidedly Jewish and Brooks, as a Jew faux conservative, hates Trump and  predicts he will utterly fail.

The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform. [Trump understands America’s problems,] But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.

We’ll see. Like 19th-century Americans, I remain an optimist.

How Trump Will Fail

a photograph of the president’s desk with no one sitting in the chair
Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times
Listen to this article · 9:59 min Learn more

After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.

Over the past few months, and especially in his second Inaugural Address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.

You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.

It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.

It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of the circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of the aristocratic novelist Henry James.

It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.)

Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a few minor details about 19th-century America from your portrait — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.)

Maybe the century’s key appeal for Trump is that in those days America was firmly anti-establishment. Across the Atlantic were the old states — Europe. Periodically, Europeans like Fanny Trollope (herself a novelist and the mother of a rather more famous one) would visit America and turn up their noses at the vulgar money-loving people they found here. The English writer Morris Birkbeck summarized his view of the American spirit this way: “Gain! Gain! Gain!” Americans were proud to defy the snobs with their refined manners, class-ridden societies and inherited luxuries.

You can draw a straight line from this (semi-mythical) image of America to the movement Trump leads today. He too leads a band of arrivistes, establishment-haters, money-seekers and unreconstructed nationalists. Many Democrats accuse Trump of ushering in an oligarchy, but new-money moguls like Elon Musk have often sided with the populists against the bien pensants. This is not oligarchy; this is what populism looks like.

Trump is drawing on themes that have been deep in the American psyche at least since Andrew Jackson became president in 1829. Populist movements, like most movements that represent the dispossessed, tend to be led by men who radiate power, masculinity and wealth. They harness American’s natural distaste for rules, regulations and bureaucratic moralists.

The quintessential thing Trump did this week was to announce an artificial intelligence development project of up to $500 billion while also revoking a Biden executive order for A.I. safety. Even Musk says the whole project is mythical hype because some of the companies involved don’t have the money. Meanwhile, weakening the safety control on the technology? What could go wrong?

Today’s populist ire is directed not at the European establishments living across an ocean but at the American ones on the east and west coasts. Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.

The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization.

Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter writes, “Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.” Sound familiar?

Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.

There’s a reason the 20th century happened. The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed in our own country and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.

Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Our system has not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the march. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.

The colorful menagerie of people who make up the proposed Trump cabinet all have one thing in common: They are self-identified disrupters. They aim to burn the systems down. Disruption is fine in the private sector. If Musk wants to start a car company and it flops, then all that’s been lost is investor money and some jobs. But suppose you disrupt and dismantle the Defense Department or the judicial system or the schools? Where are citizens supposed to go?

The history of the world since at least the French Revolution is that rapid disruption makes governments cataclysmically worse. Trump, the anti-institutionalist, is creating an electoral monarchy, a system in which all power is personalized and held in his hands. That’s a recipe for distorted information flows, corruption, instability and administrative impotence. As we’ve seen over and over again down the centuries, there’s a big difference between people who operate in the spirit of disruption and those who operate in the spirit of reform.

If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.

A Bad Year for The Wall Street Journal

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Who was Monday worse for? MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal or people on the streets of D.C. selling M.L.K. merch?

I say the Journal. MSNBC hates Donald Trump and opposes him no matter what he says. He could come out against sinkholes and MSNBC would have to be for sinkholes. Monday was just another day at the lunatic asylum.

But the Journal is supposed to be a Republican newspaper and, for decades, its most impassioned advice to Republicans has been: more wars and, above all, more immigrants!

Then along comes a New York Times-Ipsos poll — consistent with a half-dozen other polls over the past year — showing that Trump’s single most popular issue is his “mass deportation force.” And Trump’s second most popular issue is his promise to stop intervening in other countries’ wars — for example, by sending billions of dollars to Ukraine.

Both of these positions would be different from yours, Wall Street Journal.

Nearly 90% of Americans (87%) support deporting illegals who’ve committed crimes. About two-thirds (63%) support deporting the illegals who’ve come in the last four years under Joe Biden. A clear majority (55%) support deporting every illegal in the country — or as the Times puts it, “everyone living in the United States without authorization.” In other words, illegals just lost the Electoral College vote and the popular vote.

But since the 1990s, the Journal has been denouncing “the GOP’s anti-immigrationists” for sending a “cramped, pessimistic message,” and exhorting Republicans to be like Ronald Reagan, who “celebrated immigration.” (This was back when the illegal alien population was estimated to be about 2 million, compared to well north of 40 million today.) The paper routinely champions Republicans who adopt the WSJ/Ramaswamy position that any given immigrant is better than any given American. Then, they invariably go on to lose.

Trump, the biggest “anti-immigrationist” of them all, got more votes than pro-immigrationist John McCain. Today, more Hispanics want to deport illegals than voted for either Trump or McCain. Is it still the official position of the Republican Party that winning is preferable to losing?

Most recently, the Journal was flacking for the Democrats (and one idiot Republican from Oklahoma — what’s the matter with you, Oklahoma?) and their so-called “border security” bill that would have written into law the entire Biden policy on immigration. Which was to defy existing written law on immigration.

As is now conceded by pretty much everyone, the main reason Trump won all seven swing states, the Electoral College, the popular vote, and “Employee of the Month” at McDonald’s was precisely because of Biden’s great idea to throw open the border and drag in more than 11 million illegals, many of whom were covertly flown to locations inside the U.S. under the cover of darkness, never to be heard from again until they were arrested for murder.

MSNBC’s approach to the poll is to deny reality, which is actually Item No. 2 in their correspondents’ stylebook. On Monday, Joe Scarborough cited the Times-Ipsos poll, but rushed to assure his viewers that an “overwhelming” percentage of Americans don’t want to deport illegals who’ve “played by the rules.” (Other than that one rule about not sneaking into our country illegally.)

By “overwhelming,” Scarborough means “a minority” or — for you math majors out there — “less than half.” Specifically: 42% think some illegals should be able to stay, compared with 55% who say they’ve all gotta go. To put this in perspective, more Americans want abortion to be illegal in almost all circumstances than want any illegals to stay.

Contrary to the Journal’s cheerleading for our involvement in the Ukraine war, 60% of voters agree with the statement, “We should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” That includes 75% of Republicans.

Remember when the WSJ’s Rapid Response Team slapped down Gov. Ron DeSantis for saying Ukraine’s “territorial dispute” with Russia was not as important as America’s own territorial dispute over its border with the entire rest of the world?

The Journal sneered at DeSantis’ “naivete” and warned that he would come to regret questioning whether Ukraine’s border is one of America’s VITAL NATIONAL INTERESTS. “[H]ow to explain [DeSantis’s] puzzling surrender this week,” the editorial asked. It then went on to cite a series of irrelevancies, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robert Taft and “GOP isolationism.” Also Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. At the Journal, it’s always 1980, unless it’s 1939.

If DeSantis had sneered right back at the Journal, 75% of Republicans would have agreed with him. But instead, he semi-backtracked by floridly denouncing Vladimir Putin, then wandered off into digital currency, term limits, school choice, abortion, a constitutional convention and a million other micro-issues notable for not being immigration or ending foreign entanglements.

Reagan ran and won on two issues: winning the Cold War and cutting taxes. Trump ran and won (at least twice) on two issues: immigration and no more foreign adventurism. He didn’t run on the Cold War because that’s over, Wall Street Journal. Good news: We won. And he couldn’t run on immigration in 2020 because he hadn’t done anything about it. Here’s hoping his second term will be different!

I wish great Republican leaders like DeSantis would learn the good things about Trump — helpfully compiled in “In Trump We Trust“! — and not keep reverting to the standard Republican playbook, advanced by the Journal. (School choice, one of the Journal’s favorite hobby horses, just lost 65% to 35% in Kentucky — a state that Trump won by 30 points. It’s not a winning issue, Republicans. Please stop taking political advice from the Journal.)

Most interesting, the Times-Ipsos poll found that Trump is not even especially popular. He is viewed “more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years.” But his issues were a runaway hit! So much for the “cult of personality.”

Trump’s a good negotiator. How about he makes this deal with the Journal: His mass deportation force will allow one illegal alien rapist to stay for every WSJ editorial writer who self-deports?

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Now on X and SubStack

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Trying once again to get on X under a new handle: @RealKevinMacD33. Also posting TOO articles and other things on Substack: https://kmacd33.substack.com/publish/home

Let’s see how long this lasts.

Ending Federal DEI Programs and Birthright Citizenship. Definitely Steps in the Right Direction

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Re the new Trump administration, I know that I am on the optimistic end of dissident thinkers, but some very promising things are happening. Like ending DEI programs in the federal government and putting all the parasites and anti-White activists who run them on leave. And deporting the illegals. And ending birthright citizenship. All of this will be bitterly contested in the courts by the Democrats (who see all non-Whites as potentially part of their coalition of the aggrieved), but the fact that there is a conservative majority on SCOTUS is definitely a plus. Birthright citizenship should have been contested long ago. It’s not at all obvious that it is embedded in the Constitution and very few other countries do it. Here’s an argument posted on Fox News from 2011:

The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.

Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike.

But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.

The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.

This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens.

Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. included not owing allegiance to any other country.

As John Eastman, former dean of the Chapman School of Law, has said, many do not seem to understand “the distinction between partial, territorial jurisdiction, which subjects all who are present within the territory of a sovereign to the jurisdiction of that sovereign’s laws, and complete political jurisdiction, which requires allegiance to the sovereign as well.”

In the famous Slaughter-House cases of 1872, the Supreme Court stated that this qualifying phrase was intended to exclude “children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” This was confirmed in 1884 in another case, Elk vs. Wilkins, when citizenship was denied to an American Indian because he “owed immediate allegiance to” his tribe and not the United States.

American Indians and their children did not become citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. There would have been no need to pass such legislation if the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to every person born in America, no matter what the circumstances of their birth, and no matter who their parents are.

Even in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case most often cited by “birthright” supporters due to its overbroad language, the court only held that a child born of lawful, permanent residents was a U.S. citizen. That is a far cry from saying that a child born of individuals who are here illegally must be considered a U.S. citizen.

Of course, the judges in that case were strongly influenced by the fact that there were discriminatory laws in place at that time that restricted Chinese immigration, a situation that does not exist today.

The court’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment as extending to the children of legal, noncitizens was incorrect, according to the text and legislative history of the amendment. But even under that holding, citizenship was not extended to the children of illegal aliens—only permanent, legal residents.

It is just plain wrong to claim that the children born of parents temporarily in the country as students or tourists are automatically U.S. citizens: They do not meet the 14th Amendment’s jurisdictional allegiance obligations. They are, in fact, subject to the political jurisdiction (and allegiance) of the country of their parents. The same applies to the children of illegal aliens because children born in the United States to foreign citizens are citizens of their parents’ home country.

Federal law offers them no help either. U.S. immigration law (8 U.S.C. § 1401) simply repeats the language of the 14th Amendment, including the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The State Department has erroneously interpreted that statute to provide passports to anyone born in the United States, regardless of whether their parents are here illegally and regardless of whether the applicant meets the requirement of being “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. Accordingly, birthright citizenship has been implemented by executive fiat, not because it is required by federal law or the Constitution.

We are only one of a very small number of countries that provides birthright citizenship, and we do so based not upon the requirements of federal law or the Constitution, but based upon an erroneous executive interpretation. Congress should clarify the law according to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment and reverse this practice.

Originally published by Fox News in 2011

Trump Administration Directs All Federal DEI Employees Be Put on Leave

The memo directs agencies to place DEI employees on paid leave by 5 p.m. on Jan. 22.
From Epoch Times; By Aldgra Fredly
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a memo on Tuesday instructing all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) employees to be put on paid leave as agencies work to dismantle DEI initiatives. The OPM is an independent agency of the federal government that manages the federal civil service.
The memo directs agencies to place DEI employees on paid leave by 5 p.m. on Jan. 22 and to remove all websites and social media accounts associated with DEI initiatives by the same time.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order shortly after his inauguration aimed at eliminating DEI-focused policies and programs within the federal government.

According to the memo, federal agencies are required to cancel all DEI-related training programs and terminate any contractors involved in the initiatives.

Agencies were required to compile a list of federal DEI offices and staff working in those offices as of Nov. 5, 2024, and to submit a plan for executing a “reduction-in-force action” against those workers to the OPM by Jan. 31.

The memo also asks for a list of any contract or position descriptions that were changed after the Nov. 5 election “to obscure their connection” to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) programs. This list must be submitted no later than Jan. 31.

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Trump’s executive order criticized the former Biden administration for forcing “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” into virtually “all aspects” of the federal government through DEI initiatives.

It stated that “nearly every federal agency and entity submitted Equity Action Plans to detail the ways that they have furthered DEIs infiltration of the federal government” following Biden’s previous directive.

“The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination. That ends today,” the order stated.

Trump’s order directs the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Attorney General, and the director of the OPM to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

The order mandates that federal agencies terminate all offices and positions related to environmental justice, as well as any equity-focused action plans, grants, and contracts within 60 days of the order’s issuance.

It also requires agencies to compile a list of grantees that received federal funding to implement DEI and environmental justice programs since Jan. 20, 2021, and federal contractors who have provided DEI training to their employees.

During his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump said that he aims to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”

“We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” Trump said in his address. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

Among Trump’s presidential executive orders signed on inauguration day was a broad recision of 78 of Biden’s executive orders, many of which set out the former administration’s DEI agenda.

These included, among others, Biden’s Executive Order 14035 “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce;” Executive Order 14091 “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government;” Executive Order 13985 “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government;” and several of Biden’s orders for “Advancing Educational Equity” regarding various racial groups.

In addition to revoking Biden’s orders, the Trump administration in its second term will likely also bring stronger enforcement of U.S. civil rights laws for both public and private employees. The U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates private companies on issues of discrimination, states that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

NYTimes: Pushing back against the TechBro right: How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

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[A new elite is emerging in America and the question is whether the race-blind technocrats or the White ethnonationalists (represented here by Steve Bannon who describes himself as a “populist nationalist”) will emerge victorious. Clearly the Trump base is on the side of White ethnonationalism but as usual overcoming the money of the elite technocrats and, for many of them, their race-blind inclinations will be a huge challenge, as it has been with the current elite (many of whom are not at all race-blind but rather obviously ethnically motivated against the traditional White American majority). The new elite will be less Jewish, less tied to the legacy media and elite universities, and it’s already clear that many of the wealthy, including Jews, will jump on the bandwagon of whoever is in power. The question is whether it will really be on the side of traditional White Americans.

To Mr. Bannon, this chasm went deeper than some small-bore spat about visas. “These people are technofeudalists, and it’s a dangerous, dangerous thing,” he said. “Here’s what I’m glad about. It’s going to be the populist-nationalist movement that’ll take them on and break them. Because quite frankly, the established order is too gutless. The established order will go with anything that keeps their privileges.” …

“The thing about Elon,” Mr. Carl said, “is that it’s not really clear what he thinks.” Mr. Musk had defended the H-1B program by arguing that America needed to attract the “top ~.1 percent of engineering talent.” But he had also just waded into politics in Britain and Germany, where he’d promoted parties like the more-or-less openly ethnonationalist Alternative for Germany. “So that would seem to contradict what it looked like he was saying in the immigration debate here,” Mr. Carl said. “It might be that he kind of picked this fight as a way of showing he has complex views.” …

Mr. Vance once told me that he thought something “genuinely, seriously bad,” was coming to America, unless conservatives could “assemble a coalition of populists and traditionalists that can actually overthrow the ruling class.” The MAGA sphere has now managed to draw some of the richest people on earth into this project, with figures like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk casting themselves as unlikely allies in a populist overthrow of the American elite.]

NYTimes: “How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?”

Excerpt;

[Bannon] named a roster of major figures on the tech right whom he saw as enemies: Mr. Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the neo-monarchist writer Mr. Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and technologist who promotes the idea of “network states,” new countries run on blockchain.

Mr. Bannon accused the tech barons of promoting “technofeudalism” and “transhumanism”— bending human life into technologized and unnatural new forms. “This thing is all tied together,” he said. “They have a very well thought through philosophy and a very well thought through set of ideas, and they’re trying to implement that. And to me, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s scared because of their power.

“I’m a populist-nationalist, and I’m dug in on this,” he said. “I know I can take them on.” He had already seen criticism. “Everybody’s coming to me to say, ‘You can’t do this. Isn’t it going to show a rift?’ I said, ‘What do you mean a rift? It’s better to get it out now.’”

This disconnect between MAGA and the Tech Right has deep philosophical roots. The political theorist Patrick Deneen, in his book “Regime Change,” makes a point about the American right that has been plainly true for decades — that for most of modern history it has not actually been a conservative movement. He calls Republicans of the Liz Cheney or George W. Bush mold “right-liberals” and argues that their “unwavering support for a free market, ideally unhindered by regulation and political limits, frequently resulted in economic disruptions and dizzying change that undermined the stability of the very social institutions that conservatives claimed to prize.”

In a widely read 2022 essay titled “Why Conservatism Failed,” a young Catholic University of America assistant professor named Jonathan Askonas sharpened this point. He described how the old Republican guard failed to account for the power of technology, as they claimed to be standing for the American flag and family.

“When you descend from lofty rhetoric about ‘traditions’ and ‘values,’” he wrote, “a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of progressivism or socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology.”

When I spoke to Mr. Carl, the former Trump administration official, he brought up an infamous interjection into the visa debate by Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote a very long post on X in December describing an American culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” and extolling “nerdiness.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ,” he said, “or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Mr. Carl is the author of a book called The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. So it’s pretty obvious which side he falls on in these debates. But he’s intent on keeping the coalition together. “That post was silly,” he told me. Even so, he didn’t think Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy should be viewed as enemies.

“The thing about Elon,” Mr. Carl said, “is that it’s not really clear what he thinks.” Mr. Musk had defended the H-1B program by arguing that America needed to attract the “top ~.1 percent of engineering talent.” But he had also just waded into politics in Britain and Germany, where he’d promoted parties like the more-or-less openly ethnonationalist Alternative for Germany. “So that would seem to contradict what it looked like he was saying in the immigration debate here,” Mr. Carl said. “It might be that he kind of picked this fight as a way of showing he has complex views.”

On the flip side, some people have ended up finding a place in this new counterestablishment without even being necessarily conservative. “We’re all really trying for the same basic American dream sorts of things,” said Julie Fredrickson, a venture capitalist who backs crypto startups. A friend of Mr. Carl’s, she is also a kindred spirit with prominent figures on the tech right.

Ms. Fredrickson describes herself as a liberal, but she has grown increasingly frustrated by a federal government that she believes acts almost like a “moat,” preserving the power of huge established interests over both smaller businesses and technological innovation: big banks over crypto, giant, inefficient defense contractors over the new military-tech startups emerging in Southern California, oil and gas production over companies like a small-scale nuclear startup she’d just invested in.

She was still leery of the anti-immigrant talk that had emerged in the debates. “We should want the 1 percent minds,” she said. “And I mean that partially from a security state perspective, because I’m terrified by the prospect of China winning on that. I do actually think that ‘yeah, I want to win’ is a stronger message than ‘I want to do it with only people that look like me.’” She was voicing the twinned sense of possibility and frustration animating the Tech Right today: “Can we just get back to winning?”

When I spoke to Mr. Bannon, he articulated a criticism of the tech world that, perhaps surprisingly, is one that at least some right-wing tech figures share: “We haven’t created anything on the technology side like the airplane or the internal combustion engine or the steam engine or anything big,” he said. “It’s all been algorithms.”

Peter Thiel, who emerged in 2016 as the first prominent tech billionaire to back Mr. Trump, has described to me his view that technologies like social media or smartphones can offer an illusion of progress while offering dubious benefits, at best, to the world at large. After Mr. Trump’s first win, he led a quickly abandoned effort to begin dismantling the regulatory state.

But Mr. Thiel ended up largely sitting out of the 2024 election, skeptical that a second Trump administration could carry out a serious project to remake American governance. Now Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are leading a much higher-profile effort, through what they call the department of government efficiency.

“I think the Tech Right is going to win in the short-term,” said Razib Khan, a geneticist and tech consultant who is friendly with many figures in both the MAGA and Tech Right spheres. As he saw it, the talent and money were mostly on the side of tech.

“The Tech Right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage Americans” of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.”

Both sides see their path as the best approach to make America more dynamic — the MAGA intellectuals through a hoped-for “refounding” that would restore a sense of national identity and purpose, and the Tech Right through drawing the best talent from a worldwide pool, and letting competition and capitalism rip.

Mr. Trump himself has kept something like a kingly remove from the early squabbles of the aristocracy emerging in his shadow. His vice president, JD Vance, might be able to act as an intermediary between these rival wings. A former venture capitalist married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he nonetheless adopted the populist-nationalist style of politics.

Mr. Vance once told me that he thought something “genuinely, seriously bad,” was coming to America, unless conservatives could “assemble a coalition of populists and traditionalists that can actually overthrow the ruling class.” The MAGA sphere has now managed to draw some of the richest people on earth into this project, with figures like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk casting themselves as unlikely allies in a populist overthrow of the American elite.

For now, some within Mr. Trump’s orbit are happy to give them a chance. But others are already looking toward a struggle to decide who really holds the power as their revolution gets underway. “It’s time to have the debate,” Mr. Bannon told me. “You’ve got to hit them while you’re strong.”