Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/13/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! And what a day. The good news keeps coming. In today’s roundup: Republicans secure House, delivering a Trump trifecta and full control of the federal government; Trump’s picks pick up the pace and the new America First government comes into view; former neocons form up ranks forming Trump’s new foreign policy; the latest Trump effect is guaranteed to give you a good day; Obama just blocks Ten Commandments law and tees up possible Supreme Court revolution; and Elon’s Musks star is ascendant, which is probably good news for America.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
📈📈 The Hill ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “Republicans win House, delivering Trump a trifecta.” It’s not clear yet how big the House majority will be, but it’s over. Trump has his mandate.
Get ready. It only gets better.
🔥🔥 Trump’s picks are coming faster now. Forbes ran a roundup story yesterday headlined, “Trump’s Cabinet: Here Are His Picks For Key Roles—Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Pete Hegseth And More.”
Apart from the ones I’ve already told you about, here are the latest lists of announced (not rumored) selections through sometime last night:
- A new “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE): Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, no introductions needed.
- Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth, Fox News host, Army veteran, author of “The War on Warriors,” who was banned from Biden’s inauguration as an “extremist”.
- Department of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s anti-lockdown Governor who once put down a training-resistant puppy and a misbehaving goat in the same day.
- CIA Director: John Ratcliffe, who triggered dems by declassifying and releasing Hillary’s Russian Hooker Pee-Pee Binder.
- White House Counsel: William McGinley, GOP elections lawyer and former Trump White House outside counsel for election integrity. Ahem.
- Special Envoy to the Middle East: Steven Witkoff, real estate entrepreneur and Trump loyalist who testified at the President’s New York Trial, where dim-bulb Letitia James ironically called Steven “not an expert” in real estate values.
- Envoy to Israel: Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and former evangelical pastor, who’s been on GLAAD’s ‘three minutes of hate’ list for decades.
- National Security Advisor: Mike Waltz (R-Fl.), former Green Beret and four-time Bronze Star winner, who once triggered Gen. Mark Milley, causing the general to accidentally smear his lipstick in barely contained rage.
Corporate media is badly freaking out about that list of deplorables, white supremacists, garbage people, and phobics of various kinds. But it sounds good to me so far! Who’s next?
🔥🔥 David Sanger, the New York Times’s “National Security Correspondent” and the voice of the deep-state, ran a thoughtful, cautious story about Trump’s growing list of picks yesterday, headlined “Once They Were Neocons. Now Trump’s Foreign Policy Picks Are All ‘America First.’” It was good news for all sane people who yearn for peace, though oddly, Sanger seemed slightly alarmed at an expected shift from Biden’s aggressive military intervention and regime change tactics to Trump’s style of ‘transactional diplomacy.’
The article quoted Pete Hegseth (from 2020) describing how he abandoned his “hawkish” military-first foreign policy, developing a more mature, Trumpian worldview based on America First economics rather than clobbering your competitors with a rock while they aren’t looking. In Pete’s words:
Sanger described all of Trump’s foreign policy picks (plus some more rumored ones) as China hawks and Ukraine skeptics (thank goodness), and all as former neocons, who now embrace Trump’s muscular economic approach to foreign policy, also called “America First.”
Trump, it seems, has this crazy concept that not killing people makes it easier to do business with them.
The last four years of Biden and his drones of doom or hell drones or scapes or whatever they called it have had the salutary effect of sobering up the Chinese. Biden’s warmongering has made the Chinese much more interested in working things out economically rather than militarily. This puzzling development baffled the Wall Street Journal, which ran a querulous story yesterday headlined, “Trump Is Recruiting a Team of China Hawks. So Why Is Beijing Relieved?”
The answer is that Beijing is relieved because they can see Trump eschewing rabid neocons like Mike Pompeo in favor of America Firsters, who prefer to work things out on a spreadsheet rather than a battlefield. Let’s all make money.
Sanger’s story ended on what —to him— was a wistful note, a sense of lost longing for the good old days of Viktoria Nuland’s two-color-revolutions-a-month. To me, the final paragraphs were a clarion call for more prosperous and peaceful days ahead:
The world fought Trump’s foreign policy in Trump’s first term. But after four years of Biden’s neocons bringing us to the brink of nuclear annihilation, they are yearning to make a deal.
🔥🔥 One of the week’s most encouraging “Trump Effect” stories appeared as an editorial in Fast Company, titled “RIP DEI. This is what comes next.” In the wake of Trump’s election, the president of a DEI consulting firm said she’s decided to pull the plug, close up shop, shut it down.
The CEO, Amber Cabral, began like this: “It may seem extreme to decide to close my company mere hours after an election result, but let me paint the picture for you.” The colors red and orange featured prominently in Amber’s verbal portrait.
“Since late Fall of 2022,” Amber explained, “my industry has been in a major decline.” In other words, things were already headed downhill even before Trump was re-elected. Corporate America was already shifting away from DEI, cutting teams, budgets, and most importantly, outside consultants. The optics were getting really bad. Amber noted that, “a lot of DEI practitioners either didn’t have support or flat-out did not know what they were doing.” (Thank you, Matt Walsh.)
Then a couple months ago, Amber’s corporate clients put all pending DEI training sessions on hold. When she asked them why, she got two answers. First, they wanted to wait till “after the election.” Second, they worried that conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck start tweeting about their DEI activities.
And now that Trump is President, Amber expects those clients to “soon shift from postponed to canceled.”
She isn’t waiting for the body-positive lady to sing. Amber blames Americans who voted for Trump, who “don’t want to listen or be accountable or move through disconnection,” whatever that means. But she admitted that the DEI approach already wasn’t working. “The ‘let me drown you in the data so you feel guilty enough to change’ approach has been failing.”
Her sad conclusion: “It’s beyond time to put the current model to rest and with it, the clinical definitions, and the constant desire to describe and explain what our preferred diversity, equity, and inclusion acronym means and why it’s the right one. None of this is working.”
“I’m okay,” Amber rhetorically sobbed, grappling with her strong emotions, “with letting DEI rest in peace.”
RIP, DEI.
To be clear, the failure of Amber’s DEI-training business was not the good news. As a fellow entrepreneur, I sympathize with Amber, and would encourage her to move on to her next venture quickly. It will be even more successful, and probably a lot more productive, than the last one.
But if DEI consultancies are starting to close, if cowardly corporations are finally jettisoning the profoundly racist and counterproductive ideology in favor of getting back to basics, then we are even closer to winning than we thought.
🔥🔥 NBC ran an entirely predictable story yesterday headlined, “Federal judge blocks Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law in public schools.” I reported the story earlier this year after Lousiana’s terrific Governor Jeff Landry signed a provocative bill requiring a poster of the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms as a historical document, and Lousiana liberals started coughing up crawdads. What about separation of Church and State??, they cried. And they sued.
U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, a 2014 Obama appointee, held the new Louisiana law was a “facially unconstitutional” violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. The plaintiff parents who objected had to go all the way to Salem, Oregon to scare up an expert willing to testify that the Ten Commandments has no place in American history:
But it is simply a fact that Christianity occupies a fundamental place in the founding of the United States. The country was not founded by Muslims, atheists, Hindus, or Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers. Still, the Founders preserved everyone’s ability to worship —or not worship— according to their personal conscience.
But freedom of worship neither alters history nor invites changing, re-emphasizing, re-imagining, blurring, or mythologizing American history into something different.
The case is soon headed to appeal. It will go to the most conservative appellate circuit in the country—the Fifth. The Fifth Circuit’s decision will almost surely be appealed to the Supreme Court. I cannot predict whether the Court will take the case, but if it does, there is an opportunity to permanently neuter the ACLU’s anti-religion brigades and maybe even end the need for Satanist statues in state capitals.
The Supreme Court’s stance has shifted in recent years. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), the Court reversed the so-called Lemon test, instead adopting a historical analysis of the Establishment Clause. Specifically, the majority in Kennedy upheld a football coach’s on-field prayers before games. The Court was sympathetic to public religious expressions, holding that the Establishment Clause does not require a strict separation of church and state, but rather bars coercive or discriminatory practices.
Who knows how this will shake out, but you couldn’t ask for a better setup. I realize some secular readers remain skeptical, but should be reassured that this fight is less about imposing Christian religious views on anybody, and more about stopping marxist undermining of America’s moral and ethical foundations.
🧑🚀🧑🚀 Elon Musk, who pretty much bet his farm on Trump’s victory, is now a bright rising star. A series of headlines evidence just how good Elon’s bet was. First, Forbes ran a cautiously excited story yesterday headlined, “Trump 2.0 Could Put A Rocket Under SpaceX And The U.S. Space Industry.”
Elon hopes that a Trump-directed EPA will stop making SpaceX survey underground gopher tortoises and free-range porpoises to calculate how much the noise from the company’s spaceship launches bothers them.
In other words, America’s revitalized space program is about to be unleashed. “Elon, get those rocket ships going because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said in September.
The world’s most transformative technologist is well-positioned to follow through on that astonishing dream. But you just can’t please some people. The New York Times’s top story this morning was headlined, “At Mar-a-Lago, Elon Musk Puts His Imprint on the Trump Transition.” The sub-headline sneered, “He’s on the patio. He’s on the golf course. Everywhere Donald Trump looks, there is the world’s richest man.”
During the pandemic, the Democrats dynamited the space entrepreneur out of the apolitical wilderness. Before that, Elon always minded his own political business. But now, thanks to the Democrats, he’s heavily involved in the day-to-day details:
Yesterday, Elon suggested on Twitter that government employees who waste taxpayer dollars should be fired:
The New York Times found all this “government efficiency” talk deeply disturbing. What, pray tell, will happen to all the wealthy progressives who live on government largesse? Homelessness?
The Times was right to worry. The world’s most successful entrepreneur, who has personal experience with being on the wrong end of government weaponization, appears to have become an integral part of Trump’s transition team:
Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt assured The New York Times that Elon and President Trump were “great friends and brilliant leaders working together to Make America Great Again.”
“Mr. Musk,” the depressed Times dolefully reported, “helped tank the idea of neoconservatives like Mr. Pompeo winning administration roles.”
Finally, the Washington Post, not to be left behind in the hand-wringing department, ran a fretful cover story this morning headlined, “Trump taps Musk, Ramaswamy to oversee ‘drastic’ changes to U.S. government.” The sub-headline added, “The president-elect described the new commission as a ‘Manhattan Project’ to dramatically slash regulations, cut staff and ‘restructure’ federal agencies.”
It could be the Post’s worst nightmare. Because Republicans will control the Presidency, House, and Senate, Musk’s D.O.G.E. proposals could actually be passed, “potentially triggering major repercussions for the U.S. government and millions of federal workers.”
One can hope.
Despite all this wonderfully prpmising news, or perhaps because of it, the WaPo found nothing to like. It derisively dismissed the goal of reining in government as fanciful and absurd. It decried Elon’s conflicts of interest, mocked previous attempts by Republicans to reduce government waste, and snidely re-discovered the massive U.S. debt, which WaPo suddenly believes is simply too big to ever get under control. It’s no use.
We will see. They laughed when Elon cut 75% of Twitter’s staff, too. It’s a new day, and it’s Morning in America.
Have a very wonderful Wednesday! Then get back here tomorrow morning for another entertaining and informative roundup of all the fast-breaking, essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
