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Is Our Five-Year Nightmare Finally Over?

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Infowars: Is Our Five-Year Nightmare Finally Over?

Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The scheme of lockdown-until-vaccination was the biggest effort of government and industry on a global scale on historical record. It was all designed to transfer wealth to winning industries (pharma, online retail, streaming services, online education), divide and conquer the population, and consolidate power in the administrative state.

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Is our nightmare over? Not yet. Writing not even a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump, it is still unclear just how much authority he truly exercises over the sprawling executive branch. For that matter, no one can even agree on how large this branch is: between 2.2 million and 3 million employees and somewhere between 400 and 450 agencies. The financial bleed in this realm is unthinkable and far worse than even the biggest cynic can imagine.

Five former secretaries of the Treasury took to the pages of the New York Times with a shocking claim. “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.” This has included a career employee called “fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”

There is no reason even to read between the lines. What this means is that no person voted into office by the people and no one appointed by such a person has access to the federal books since 1946. This is startling beyond belief. No owner of any company would ever tolerate being barred from the accounting offices and payment systems. And no company can offer any public stock without independent audits and open books.

And yet almost 80 years have gone by during which time neither has been true for this gigantic enterprise called the federal government. That means that $193 trillion has been spent by an institution that has never faced granulated oversight from the people and never met the normal demands that every enterprise faces every day.

The usual habit in Washington has been to treat every elected leader and their appointments as temporary and transitory marionettes, people who come and go and disturb little to nothing about the normal operations of government. This new administration seems to have every intention to change that but the job is inconceivably challenging. As much public support as MAGA/MAHA/DOGE enjoy for now, and as many people from those groups are getting embedded in the power structure, they are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by millions of agents of the old order.

This transition will not be easy if it happens at all.

The inertia of the old order is mighty. Even on the issue of health and pandemics, there is already confusion. CBS News has reported that Fauci-loyalist and mRNA pusher Gerald Parker will head the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response or OPPR. The report cited only unnamed “health officials” and the appointment has been celebrated by Scott Gottlieb, the Pfizer board member who nudged Trump into backing lockdowns in 2020.

All the while, this appointment has not been confirmed by the White House. We do not know if OPPR, created by Congressional charter, will even be funded. The reporter will not reveal his sources – raising the question of why any appointment having to do with health should be surrounded by such cloak-and-dagger machinations.

If Dr. Parker becomes ensconced in this position and another health emergency is declared, this time for Bird flu, HHS and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will not be in any kind of decision-making position at all.

The larger problems have to do with a broader question: is the president really in charge of the executive branch? Can he hire and fire? Can he spend money or decline to spend money? Can he set policy for the agencies?

One might suppose that the whole answer to these questions can be found in Article 2, Section 1: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” And yet that sentence was written almost 100 years before Congress created this thing called the “civil service” that nowhere appears in the Constitution. This fourth branch has grown in size and power to swamp both the presidency and the legislature.

Courts are going to have to sort this out, and already an avalanche of lawsuits has hit the new administration for daring to presume control over agencies and their activities of which the president is and must necessarily be held accountable. Lower federal courts seem to be demanding that the president be that in name only, while the Supreme Court might have a different opinion.

The much-ballyhooed “constitutional crisis” consists of nothing other than an attempt to reassert the original constitutional design of government.

This is the background template in which RFK, Jr., takes power at HHS, and oversees all the sub-agencies. These agencies played a huge role in covering for the attack on liberty and rights over five years. His confirmation is a symbolic repudiation of the most egregious public policies on record. And yet, the repudiation is entirely implicit: there has been no commission, no admission of error, no one truly held responsible, and no real accountability.

The trajectory on which we find ourselves affords many reasons for champagne celebrations, but sober up quickly. There is a very long way to go and enormous barriers in place to get us to the point that we are really safe again from the marauding corporatist/statist complex and their plots and schemes to rob the public of rights and liberties. In the meantime, to invoke a common phrase, keep these new appointees in your thoughts and prayers.

Musk’s Attack on Waste, Fraud and Abuse Threatens Status Quo 

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Musk’s Attack on Waste, Fraud and Abuse Threatens Status Quo

Desperate to protect government employees who are paid upward of $100,000 a year to surf porn all day (or do something even more disgusting, like funnel money to USAID), Democrats are beside themselves about Elon Musk. His Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) clearly violates the very letter and spirit of government work.

Fourteen states and dozens of “civil servants” (useless government employees) have sued to stop this madman. Luckily for the media, there are stables of law professors ready to assure the public that the lawsuits are based on solid legal theories, just like the Russian collusion investigation, Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, Colorado’s attempt to keep Trump off the ballot and so on.

The gist of their argument is that Musk has been given enormous power and therefore requires Senate confirmation.

What kind of president would give massive authority to an adviser who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate? Only every Democratic president who’s ever lived.

The difference is that their advisers are unconfirmed because they’re progressive lunatics who couldn’t be confirmed in a million years. The other difference is the Democrats’ unconfirmed advisers proceed to do things the American people don’t want and didn’t ask for — as opposed to Musk, who is doing something the voters definitely do want and did ask for.

Neither voters nor the Senate voted for Soviet spy Alger Hiss to be President Franklin Roosevelt’s top adviser. But he sat at the president’s side at Yalta, as FDR cheerfully condemned tens of millions of people to live under communism.

(Just think of the havoc Musk could wreak!)

Then there was Hillary Clinton, who was put in charge of remaking America’s entire health care system. She wasn’t confirmed; her only authority came from being the president’s wife. Hillary promptly hired the unconfirmed and unconfirmable Ira Magaziner, and together, they assembled a “task force” with more than 600 members, who not only weren’t confirmed, but whose names were hidden from the public. (Many, it later turned out, had a financial interest in the plan.)

So beloved by the public was Hillary’s task force that it helped usher in a Republican landslide in the next midterm election.

Moving from domestic calamities to international menaces, Susan Rice, President Obama’s secretary of state nominee, withdrew her name because she was facing certain rejection by the Senate for repeatedly lying about the attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. (Rice, along with Hillary and Dana Perino, loudly blamed the Sept. 11, 2012, attack not on the terrorists, but on an American who’d made a video saying mean things about Muhammad. Liberal motto: Always blame Americans first!)

Instead, Rice became Obama’s unconfirmed foreign policy adviser. Among other catastrophes, she enflamed the president’s already difficult relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu by blowing him off during the Iran negotiations. Because, really, what possible interest would Israel have in our talks with a regime whose sole interest is the total eradication of Israel?

This was according to Obama’s Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, who also quoted Rice’s warm remark about Netanyahu, sneering that he did everything but “use the N-word in describing the president.” At least that Iran deal was a huge success!

Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, took as her main adviser the unconfirmed Sidney Blumenthal, whom Obama had expressly refused to hire. Fully one-third of her emails on Libya were from Blumenthal, as he guided her into the most disastrous foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, with the possible exception of Yalta: the removal of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi.

This self-aggrandizing idiocy resulted in two world-changing fiascos, including the destruction of Europe.

Gaddhafi was crazy, but after our invasion of Iraq, he became America’s bitch, terrified that we’d invade him next. Nine months after the war began, he voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons program, invited in weapons inspectors, and finally admitted his role in the Lockerbie bombing, paying billions of dollars to the victims.

(Despite the blindingly obvious timeline, there’s loads of revisionist history out there claiming Iraq had NOTHING to do with it and Gaddhafi had been thinking about giving up nukes for years. Yes, and Ronald Reagan didn’t win the Cold War: It was the brilliant groundwork laid by Harry Truman that finally came to fruition a half-century later. Liberals are frantic revisionists.)

But Hillary, egged on by Blumenthal, wanted a foreign policy win of her own in anticipation of her next presidential run. For no geopolitical reason whatsoever, she pushed a reluctant Obama into approving NATO bombing raids over Libya until Gaddhafi was driven from power.

The deed nearly done, on Aug. 22, 2011, Blumenthal emailed Hillary: “First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it.” Telling her to “go on camera,” he instructed, “you must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment.” Finally, he gloated, “You are vindicated.”

As soon as Gaddhafi was murdered in the desert, Mrs. Clinton cackled to a reporter, “We came, we saw, he died.”

The fall of Gaddhafi had two devastating consequences: 1) Libya instantly became a training ground for Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS; and 2) It led directly to the migrant crisis enveloping Europe to this day.

A decade before his death, Gaddhafi had warned European leaders that their continent would turn “black” and “Europe might no longer be European,” unless he blocked the millions of “starving and ignorant Africans” from moving there.European leaders happily paid him billions of dollars to stop the invasion. No Gaddhafi, and now no Europe.

When Elon has created tragedies on four separate continents, give me a call.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER

Study: Homeschoolers Have Highest Life Satisfaction, Better Families, Least Divorce Rates, and are Least Depressed

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The Cardus Educational Survey is conducted out of the Baylor University School of Education. It is self-consciously Christian—a surprise given the general atmosphere of American universities these days. This of course does not mean that their survey is flawed, but readers should be aware of this. The results are not surprising given that homeschoolers are generally going to be more religious and more likely to uphold traditional values related to family and marriage. From their website:

We all crave connection because it’s fundamental to who we are as humans. As bearers of God’s image, we reflect His nature when we form meaningful relationships with others. At the heart of Christian leadership is the call to love and serve others, just as Christ did for us. By embodying this grace and love, we empower others to flourish and live out their full potential. At our core, we are all designed for connection and community.

Study: Homeschoolers Have Highest Life Satisfaction, Better Families, Least Divorce Rates, and are Least Depressed

A Cardus Educational Survey (CES) has discovered that homeschooled children outperformed their non-homeschooled peers on various psychosocial issues. Between 2019 and 2021, school enrolment declined by 2.1 million while homeschooling increased by 30%.

The trend was largely influenced by the pandemic when homeschooling was mandatory. However, many parents continued to teach their children at home even after physical classes resumed.

The CES report that studied adults between adults 24 to 39 years old analyzed economic, mental health, civic, spiritual, and family formation among homeschooled and non-homeschooled individuals.

It categorized the subjects into short-term homeschoolers (1-2 years of homeschooling), medium-term homeschoolers (3-7 years), and long-term homeschoolers (over 8 years). The individuals attended traditional public schools, Catholic schools, Protestant schools, nonreligious independent schools, or were homeschooled.

One key finding was that homeschooled adults exhibited better mental health than their non-homeschooled peers amid the nation’s ongoing mental health crisis affecting teens and young adults.

The report found that long-term homeschoolers had the highest levels of optimism, gratitude, and life satisfaction. They were also the least likely to “feel helpless dealing with life’s problems” or report depression and anxiety symptoms.

Similarly, short-term and long-term homeschoolers were more likely to volunteer and give to charity in the last 12 months compared to medium-term homeschoolers or those who were never homeschooled.

Homeschooled individuals also reported higher rates of belief in God and participation in religious activities compared to non-homeschoolers. The rate of religiosity was proportional to the number of years spent homeschooling.

“The prevalence of religious belief and practice increased with the number of years spent in the homeschool sector,” the study stated.

This is hardly surprising considering that the education system is highly anti-religious while allowing other negative ideologies to thrive within the learning environment.

Long-term homeschoolers were also more likely to be married, have more children on average, and had the lowest divorce rates. The study did not attribute this finding to any ideology, but the school system has been pushing anti-family ideologies such as feminism and LGBTQ+, which greatly undermine family formation.

Given the diverse nature of the study subjects, it is likely that these results are more nuanced than reported. If the study isolated individuals who attended public schools, where woke culture thrives, vs homeschooled individuals, the results would likely be groundbreaking. Many religious and private schools still instill conservative values and are free of the woke culture that plagues public schools, thus potentially neutralizing its effect.

Another concerning finding of the CES survey was that homeschooled individuals were less likely to be full-time employed compared to those who physically attended school. Given their tendency to have more children on average, getting married, and being less likely to be divorced, it was likely that some were stay-at-home parents taking care of their families.

Likely, their decision to take care of their children instead of pursuing a career resulted in better mental health outcomes for themselves and their children. No amount of financial success can substitute for good mental health and a nice family when the “achievers” live in a perpetual state of mental anguish, anxiety, helplessness, and silent desperation.

As the study indicated, long-term homeschooled individuals had better mental health, were happier, more grateful, and were the least likely to feel helpless, and contributed more towards charity. …

ZeroHedge: Liberal Women Are Lonely And Unhappy According To Recent Polls

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Liberal Women Are Lonely And Unhappy According To Recent Polls

The news must come as a shock to most, but it turns out that liberal women in the US are very unhappy.  A recently released poll from the American Family Survey held in 2024 shows that only 12% of liberal women are satisfied with their lives and that they are three times more likely to experience loneliness compared to conservative women.

The data reinforces a number of surveys over the years which reveal a continuing plunge in relative happiness among progressive western women despite their admission that they have more independence than ever before.

Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies who analyzed the survey’s data, said he believes there are a couple of reasons why conservative young women are more likely to be happier than their liberal counterparts.

“We’ve seen in the research that conservative women tend to be more likely to embrace a sense of agency and to have the sense that they are not, in any way, the victim of larger structural realities or forces,” he told Fox News Digital.  “They’re also less likely to catastrophize about public events and concerns,” and “more likely to think of themselves as captains of their own fate,” Wilcox added.

The survey also notes that conservative women are more likely to accept biological and social differences between males and females.  The ideal was thought to be common sense for thousands of years but has come under fire from feminists in the past decade as a “social construct of the patriarchy”.  The deconstruction of societal norms has been so pervasive, governments across the western world have tried to encode intersectional feminist taboos into law and punish people who remain skeptical.

One side effect of the rise of feminist authority that liberals apparently did not expect is the decline in relative happiness of women.  The issue was fist noticed around 2009 when a study out of the University of Pennsylvania stunned the mainstream media — Despite decades of greater access to the jobs market, institutional influence and life options since the 1970s, young women have become increasingly less happy compared to their counterparts of past generations.  Though the study avoids addressing the problem of feminism directly, it does suggest that modern constructs may play a major role in creating anxiety for women.

While men’s personal happiness has also been in sharp decline in recent decades, their financial opportunities have remained relatively static.  For women, financial and social opportunity has skyrocketed (along with access to college education), but their decline in happiness is even more dramatic than men.

The American Family Survey helps to clarify the source of the happiness decline by separating out women according to their ideological leanings.  It’s not conservative women that are dragging those numbers down, it’s leftist women.

It makes sense.  Before the 1970s the role of men as breadwinners was well established while women’s primary concerns focused on the household and family.  Men are more psychologically inclined to compartmentalize problems associate with risk and anxiety, especially when in the role of provider and protector.  The thing that drives men to unhappiness is not hard work and sacrifice, but not being able to fulfill the roles they are designed for.

By extension, it may be that liberal women today are suffering from a similar affliction; they are unhappy because they are not fulfilling the roles they are biologically designed for.  In other words, both men and women were happier under the “patriarchy”, when men protected and provided while women took care of the home and nurtured their children.

Trump 2.0 ends federal funding for woke programs at universities.

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It’s long been apparent that the only way to rein in the radical left that dominates academia is to cut off their money. Although these actions certainly fit with color-blind conservative ideology, it does mention discrimination against Whites (and Asians) and specifically targets CRT which is nothing but anti-White hate. So I think the ruling is an important step in the right direction. From: “Education Department Cancels Another $350M in Contracts, Grants.”

On Feb. 10, the Trump administration said it canceled nearly $900 million in Institute of Education Sciences contracts. Then, on Thursday night—in a news release titled “U.S. Department of Education Cancels Additional $350 Million in Woke Spending”—the department announced the severing of the REL contracts.

“Review of the contracts uncovered wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers,” the department said. It said REL Midwest “has been advising schools in Ohio to undertake ‘equity audits’ and equity conversations.”

… The release also said the department “terminated grants to four Equity Assistance Centers totaling $33 million, which supported divisive training in DEI, critical race theory and gender identity for state and local education agencies as well as school boards.” It didn’t hint at restoring this funding. …

On Thursday afternoon, [Christopher] Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, posted on X a few examples of what he had telegraphed as “a trove of insane videos, slides and documents from the Department of Education. The whole department functions like a Ponzi scheme for left-wing ideologies.”

This should certainly help. And there’s also the ruling that DEI violates Civil Rights law by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. Excerpt:

Ed Department: DEI Violates Civil Rights Law

In a sweeping and unprecedented letter issued over the weekend, the Office for Civil Rights declared race-based scholarships, cultural centers and even graduation ceremonies illegal.

 

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter prohibiting all race-based programming and spending at colleges.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights declared all race-conscious student programming, resources and financial aid illegal over the weekend and threatened to investigate and rescind federal funding for any institution that does not comply within 14 days.

In a Dear Colleague letter published late Friday night, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor outlined a sweeping interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which struck down affirmative action. While the decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious spending, activities and programming at colleges.

“In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students,” Trainor wrote. “These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia.”

The letter mentions a wide range of university programs and policies that could be subject to an OCR investigation, including “hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”

“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” Trainor writes.

 

J.D. Vance’s Munich Speech

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J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich conference is a reason for optimism about Trump 2.0. The first part is all about Europe’s war on free speech from the right (with outrageous examples from several countries) and not trusting its voters. The second part addresses the disaster of mass migration to the West. Vance gets it, and we must assume he is speaking for Trump 2.0.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

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And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city [when an Afghan migrant rammed a car into a crowd, killing a woman and child, and injuring others]. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.

I just think that people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.

And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what no democracy — American, German or European — will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

And then there’s The New York Times. Naturally, the Times is not pleased:

Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech

Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have challenged decades-long approaches to political extremism that were designed to prevent another Hitler.

the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.

German intelligence agencies have classified parts of the AfD as extremist. Members have been arrested in connection with multiple plots to overthrow the government. Some reportedly attended last year a gathering that included discussions of deporting not only asylum seekers, but German citizens who immigrated to the country.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Munich on Saturday morning, as part of a lengthy rebuke of Mr. Vance.

“This ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day,” he said. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”

Decades of German law and political practice have revolved around the belief that to prevent another Hitler from coming to power, the government must ban hate speech and shun political parties deemed extreme. The nation has an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, with intelligence tools to monitor extremists, and a constitutional court that in rare cases can ban parties entirely.

Mr. Vance, like another Trump administration official, Elon Musk, has parachuted into the country’s parliamentary elections, criticizing that approach. Both men say it is time for Germans to stop policing speech and to start treating the country’s hard-right flank as the avatars of disenfranchised voters who share Mr. Trump’s opposition to large-scale immigration.

Vance:

Omitting opening pleasantries.

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine — and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense — the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.

We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

And thank God they lost the Cold War. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the cold war’s winners.

I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.” Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny” on the internet.

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant — and I’m quoting — a “free pass” to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of his unborn son.

He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square. Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours.

Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term “burden sharing,” but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

Have we learned nothing, that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things.

And of course, we know that very well. In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.

And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city [when an Afghan migrant rammed a car into a crowd, killing a woman and child]. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.

I just think that people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.

And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential. And trust me, I say this with all humor — if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what no democracy — American, German or European — will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. Europeans, the people have a choice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we built together as a shared society.

To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said: “Do not be afraid.”

We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.

Thank you all. Good luck to all of you. God bless you.

Internationalist 360º: Black Day for Ukrainian Nationalism: USAID Programs Suspension Hits Kiev War Regime Hard

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Ukrainian Media: Bought and paid for by the United States and the EU.

“This is the first time that readers, viewers, or listeners of mass media in Ukraine are learning of the extent to which U.S. government agencies have been funding the operations of the state of Ukraine and the country’s loyal, nationalist, mass media.” Ever since the coup in Ukraine in February 2014, this media has worked tirelessly to condemn all things Russian, pitting Ukrainians against Russians. The aid suspension has provoked panic among countless thousands of state and government officials as well as journalists and other media workers.

Black Day for Ukrainian Nationalism: USAID Programs Suspension Hits Kiev War Regime Hard

Posted by Internationalist 360° on 

Dmitri Kovalevich

The suspension of USAID funding to Ukraine by the new U.S. administration has exposed the extent of Western financial influence on Ukrainian media, government, and nationalist movements.

In late January 2025, the new U.S. administration in Washington announced a 90-day suspension of U.S. government programs, including overseas aid. In explaining the move, new White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt harshly condemned the previous presidential regime of Joseph Biden for spending “like drunken sailors”. She made no specific mention of Ukraine nor USAID, the main foreign aid funding arm of her government.

The Ukrainian Telegram channel ‘Rubicon’ reported in a lengthy posting on January 28, “All Ukrainian clients of U.S. foreign aid have received letters from their sponsors announcing suspensions for an indefinite period of all new requests for USAID funding.” As a result, most aid recipients among mass media in Ukraine have published appeals to their readers to pay for subscriptions and reader access going forward, saying the revenue is needed due to the suspension of new applications for USAID funding.

The channel continues, “This is the first time that readers, viewers, or listeners of mass media in Ukraine are learning of the extent to which U.S. government agencies have been funding the operations of the state of Ukraine and the country’s loyal, nationalist, mass media.” Ever since the coup in Ukraine in February 2014, this media has worked tirelessly to condemn all things Russian, pitting Ukrainians against Russians. The aid suspension has provoked panic among countless thousands of state and government officials as well as journalists and other media workers.

Rubicon explains further, “We note that this decree does not affect previously agreed programs of weapons supply to Ukraine. The Pentagon has assured that weapons-production programs in Ukraine as well as weapons deliveries from U.S. Army warehouses will continue according to previously-agreed volumes.”

Ukraine.ru columnist Viktoriya Titova wrote on January 30, “The nationalist interpretation of modern Ukraine, paid for with Western money, may have to move toward self-sufficiency. Since this Ukraine happens to stand on feet of clay, the propagandists’ greatest fear is that the Ukrainian population will quickly sober up and start returning to its true values. All this is now on display in writings and comments in social media. Alternative viewpoints by opinion leaders in the country are emerging in social media outlets.”

Titova continued, “Ukrainian grant-eaters continue to expose themselves. The suspension of American aid for social and humanitarian projects (read: propaganda processing of the population) has sown panic in the ranks of the patriots.”

In Ukraine as in Russia, recipients of foreign grants are traditionally disliked and perceived as selling out their respective countries. They are typically described with the pejorative term ‘grant-eaters’. A Ukrainian official who has been receiving Western grants for a long time is typically regarded as someone who is completely disconnected from the common people, speaking in empty clichés typical of American officials that sound like nothing more than babble.

The publication of information about who has been receiving USAID funding has stirred a flurry of angry writings on social networks in Ukraine because it reveals many officials and journalists in Ukraine to be little more than paid agents of the United States government. It sheds much light on why, exactly, they have been propagating war against Russia.

Nothing can come from idealizing Donald Trump nor his Republican Party administration, but it is a fact that the aid recipients in Ukraine during the past four years have been or have become devoted clients of Trump’s rivals in the Democratic Party administration in Washington.

Scope of foreign funding

Ukrainian legislator Maryan Zablotskyy reported on his Facebook page on January 27 on 112 current USAID funded projects in Ukraine of varying durations amounting to US$7 billion. The New York Times reported on February 9 the total funding by USAID by country for 2023, the latest year in which full figures are available. It showed that Ukraine was, by far, the largest recipient that year at US$16.6 billion, followed by apartheid Israel at US$3.3 billion.

Zablotskyy’s Facebook report specifically cited seven programs funded by US$297 million over the past three years. He said these are of dubious value or none at all and said there are dozens more such projects receiving funding. He wrote, “Maybe some people need such spending, but I don’t quite understand why U.S. taxpayers feel the need to pay for it. And why isn’t the Ukraine government asking for funding of programs that are clearly more necessary?”

Governments of the European Union are also providing high levels of aid funding to Ukraine.

Continues…