Selecting a new pope.

I’m off to Rome Friday morning to cover, for the third time in 20 years, the ancient process of selecting a new pope to lead the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.3 billion followers – 70 million of whom live in the United States and 121,000 of whom live within the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas (home to my radio station, KTBB).

Full disclosure: I am a professing Christian, but I am not Catholic.

Nevertheless, because of the work attendant to my coverage of two prior conclaves, I have for all intents made the Catholic Church my “beat.” I follow news about the Church closely.

Much of that news has not been good. The Church has real problems. Europe – once Roman Catholicism’s center of gravity – is now largely secular. The continent is filled with beautiful Catholic churches where weekly mass attendance now numbers in the low dozens. Most European Catholic churches are now little more than art museums.

I will long remember walking into a beautiful neighborhood Catholic church in Rome while visiting Italy with my wife. The parish priest – rather than ministering to a parishioner or preparing the homily for Sunday – was instead setting up a souvenir stand to sell inexpensive Catholic-themed trinkets to tourists so that he might raise the money to keep the ancient building from falling in on itself.

The picture isn’t quite that bleak here in America. But still, weekly mass attendance is way down from 25 years ago.

Many of the Church’s infirmities are self-inflicted. The clergy abuse scandal that came to light on the watch Pope John Paul II has yet to be adequately addressed two popes later. The attendant price is incalculable. To my mind, no single thing has contributed more to the Church’s loss of moral authority than its failure to decisively root out pederast priests, no matter the immediate consequences attendant to losing clergy when clergy is already in short supply.

Another self-inflicted wound is the financial mismanagement at the Roman Curia – the central administrative body of the Catholic Church. Rich though it is in breathtakingly beautiful Renaissance art and priceless treasures, the church nevertheless sits perilously close to financial collapse.

And a deep philosophical divide that grips the Church contributed to the 2023 ouster of the Bishop of Tyler – a man beloved by Catholic and non-Catholics here in East Texas.

But for all that, and as I said when I wrapped up our coverage of the conclave in 2013, despite its acknowledged sins over the centuries, in the full arc of history the Roman Church has been a force for good in the world. Through the ages the Church has comforted the afflicted, healed the sick and brought the light of education into an otherwise dark world.

As the Church has fumbled its moral authority, nothing good has rushed in to fill the resulting vacuum.

So, I’m off to Rome in the hope that at a particularly difficult moment in the Church’s 2,000-year history, God leads the College of Cardinals to select a particularly right man to lead it.

It wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was worse.

We’re coming up on 100 days since Joe Biden left office and given the stark contrast between the Biden and Trump administrations, we are coming to understand just how cosmically awful Joe Biden’s time in office really was.

It was a disaster from its first day to its last.

Even granting enormous quantities of grace, one cannot find a single Biden administration policy that made Americans safer or more prosperous. Not one. On Biden’s watch the world became more dangerous and the American middle class slipped back into the decline from which it had briefly emerged in Trump’s first term. (And please, spare me the stock market. Half of the market gain on Biden’s watch was swallowed by inflation. The rest was largely driven by the share prices of Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – the so called “Magnificent Seven.” The rest of the market barely budged.)

We don’t have time for an exhaustive analysis of the things that Biden got wrong. That exercise could legitimately be made into a semester-long three-hour college credit course. (Not holding my breath.)

Let’s just bear down on the two Biden administration policy failures that will have the longest lasting negative consequences.

The first – surprise, surprise – is Biden’s catastrophic border policy. We’ll never know exactly how many illegal migrants Joe Biden allowed to invade our country. Estimates range from eight to 15 million. Whatever that unknowable number, it’s horrific. No nation has ever allowed chaotic mass migration on anything close to such a scale. As a result, there is no template for what happens next.

We already know that the resulting pressure on social services, schools, hospitals and police departments has been overwhelming. There’s no practical way to get these migrants out of the country and there is no effort whatsoever to assimilate them into American culture. Their presence is a large-scale balkanizing force, the staggering social costs of which will be borne by generations yet to come.

The second cosmic disaster is Biden’s reckless spending. When taken together, his “American Rescue Plan,” the “Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act” and the ironically named, “Inflation Reduction Act” total up to $6 trillion in spending that an already deeply indebted nation can ill afford. None of these spending boondoggles accomplished any of their stated goals. They only added to an already unsustainable debt.

There are two lessons to be learned from Biden’s terrible presidency.

Lesson one is keep Democrats out of office. Today’s Democrats — as embodied in Joe Biden — will blindly promote increasing the scope of government no matter how often or to what degree government makes things demonstrably worse.

Lesson two is that today’s Democrats aren’t about effective governance anyway. Nor are they about the poor or the middle class or “hard working Americans” or any other group to which they endlessly pander.

Democrats are about Democrats. They’re about power (and the concomitant money).

Which leads to a third lesson. As bad as Biden was, given what the party has become, the next Democrat to win the White House won’t be appreciably better.

A season of resurrection.

For Christians this is an important week. It’s when Christians observe the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It is the resurrection – rather than the crucifixion or even the nativity – that stands at the heart of the Christian faith. Jesus’s followers couldn’t avoid seeing the brutality of His crucifixion. What they didn’t see coming was the resurrection.

If it weren’t for the resurrection that we celebrate every Easter, it’s unlikely that we would still be celebrating the nativity every Christmas.

Resurrection, the triumph of life over death, hope over despair, lies at the heart of what gives Christianity its appeal. Whether you believe in the literal bodily resurrection of Christ or not, the resurrection story of ultimate triumph – of things working out in the end despite appearing to be hopeless – provides the basis for an optimistic life. (Living pessimistically, to my way of thinking, is to be barely living at all.)

I offer this as predicate to the political commentary that readers and listeners have come to expect in this space. And I say it despite my deep reluctance to invoke theology – any theology – to make a point about contemporary politics. Beyond that general caution I am very specifically cautious to never deify a politician. The blood-soaked pages of history are filled with examples of the bad things that happen when politicians get turned into gods.

But with that disclaimer fully stated, I am struck this Easter by some clear parallels between the politics of Jesus’s day and the politics of now.

Let’s start with the obvious. Jesus was a disrupter. So is Donald Trump.

In Jesus’s day the religious leaders (i.e. the Pharisees and the Sadducees), the lawyers (i.e. the Scribes), and the religious ruling council (i.e. the Sanhedrin) – in other words the entirety of the ‘establishment’ – were uniform in their opposition to Jesus. Jesus’s teachings threatened their power and standing. If you went to Sunday School as a kid you were told of Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. The establishment was comfortable. Jesus made them decidedly uncomfortable.

The parallel to Donald Trump is almost exact. Trump’s presence in Washington presents an existential threat to the D.C. establishment, an establishment comprised of most Democrats, too many Republicans and career federal bureaucrats.

Trump’s creation of DOGE is nothing less than a latter-day turning over of the tables in the temple.

Thus, the second parallel – persecution.

The persecution of Jesus led to his arrest, conviction and execution. Of those three, Donald Trump suffered the first two and only narrowly escaped the third.

Leading to the third parallel – resurrection. According to the Scripture Jesus was bodily resurrected. According to the November 2024 election, Trump was politically resurrected.

Let me stop and again emphasize that I am not directly comparing Donald Trump to Jesus. Jesus, according to Christian gospel, is the Son of God. Donald Trump is a mere mortal – and a deeply flawed one at that.

The theme of this essay is resurrection. Flawed mortal that he is, Donald Trump is the driving force behind a nascent American resurrection.

It couldn’t be timelier. To quote Lincoln, the occasion is piled high with difficulty. We’re $36 trillion in debt and growing that debt at the rate of about $2 trillion a year. Faith in our core institutions has been shattered. The American middle class is shrinking and losing wealth, even as an elite, entitled and drippingly condescending ruling class is growing and getting richer. The malignant regime of China is enriching itself at the expense of American workers. Administrations of both parties – but most particularly the immediate prior administration – have allowed millions of people into the country who are now living on the backs of already overburdened American citizens.

Having weathered everything that could be thrown at him (figuratively and literally), Donald Trump is stronger than ever and moving at muzzle velocity to address these problems. Our latter-day Sadducees, Pharisees, Scribes, Sanhedrin, et. al. are beside themselves and almost literally foaming at the mouth.

But ordinary, working American citizens – many of whom never voted for a Republican prior to Donald Trump – having despaired, are now hopeful of a 21^st century American renaissance.

A resurrection.

How appropriate in this Easter season, when hope is the central theme.

Boiled down, Trump’s tariffs are really all about China.

The story of the month – the story that has pushed Ukraine and Gaza and pretty much everything else off the front page (forgive the anachronistic reference) – is Trump’s tariffs. A 3,900-point drop in the Dow will do that.

This story has its genesis, in part, in the Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton was hellbent on bringing China – a totalitarian communist nation with a struggling economy – into the World Trade Organization.

Clinton’s critics alleged that he and his wife, Hillary, stood to profit personally from giving China the prestige and the enormous economic boost that WTO membership conferred. There is good evidence to suggest that the critics were correct.

Clinton, for his part, told us that bringing China into the WTO would lead to China’s liberalization and its adoption of Western values, all while eventually freeing its 1.4 billion citizens from the yoke of communism.

But it wasn’t just Clinton. George W. Bush, on whose watch China’s WTO membership became official, said this:

Politically, [China] can be a partner in working for peace and security. A China that embraces freedom at home will be a more responsible partner abroad.”

That statement didn’t age well.

What happened instead is that with China enjoying “Most Favored Nation” status, American manufacturers gained access to Chinese manufacturing capacity. However, American companies didn’t go blowing in to help Chinese workers unionize, or to start investing in “green” technologies to make China’s factories more friendly to the environment.

American companies went into China to take advantage of manufacturing unfettered by U.S. environmental regulation, U.S. minimum wage laws, U.S. labor law, U.S. workplace safety regulations, U.S. “green” energy mandates and, indeed, the entire U.S. smorgasbord of rules, restrictions and regulations.

And given just how byzantine and expensive the American regulatory state is, who can blame them?

But there is blame for this. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization effectively gave American manufacturers guilt-free access to slave labor. For American companies it was like being able to eat chocolate eclairs and Blue Bell Ice Cream after every meal without gaining weight.

Since then, upward of 90,000 U.S. manufacturing plants have shut down and millions of manufacturing jobs have evaporated, all at the expense of the American middle class. From a sociological perspective, millions of men who would have otherwise been able to afford to buy homes and raise families, were instead relegated to itinerant employment and permanent second-class status – all for the sake of marginally cheaper consumer goods.

Meanwhile the American economy is now yoked to a corrupt, tyrannical country that has the aim – and is gaining the means – to relegate the whole of the U.S.A. to second-class status.

Yes, the tariffs are scary. My wife’s and my retirement portfolio is, at the moment, even scarier still.

But Trump is at last confronting a problem that must be confronted. That is unless you want your kids saying to your grandkids, “America was the richest nation in the world once. But it’s not anymore because Nana and Grampy wanted a cheaper flatscreen TV.”

Trump’s tariffs: A yuuuge gamble.

Markets are tanking following the trade tariffs that President Trump is putting in place this week.

I’ll admit, I’m a little nervous. If this doesn’t work, it could hurt the very voters that put Trump in office. Republicans could lose the House of Representatives in 2026 which would effectively end Trump’s presidency.

But tariffs may be the only practical method for dealing with a problem that has been festering since World War II.

At the end of the war, the only developed country on the planet with a functioning economy was the United States. Europe and Japan had to be gotten back on their economic feet and the United States was the only country with the means to help them. But America could never have afforded the direct costs of rebuilding Europe and Japan, so a tariff structure was put in place that greatly advantaged European and Japanese industry.

It was a “backdoor” way of financing post-war reconstruction.

By the time Kennedy was president, post-war reconstruction was largely complete but asymmetric tariffs had become “business as usual.” So it has been since. Consequently, you see BMWs and Toyotas all over the United States, but you don’t see many Chevrolets in Europe or Japan.

Then there’s China. When Richard Nixon made overtures to China it was an economically weak communist nation with nuclear weapons and a general hostility to the West. But it was at odds with the Soviet Union and because the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Nixon sought rapprochement with China.

The belief was that if China could be made economically healthy, it would naturally gravitate toward liberal Western values. So, China too was propped up with favorable tariffs to help modernize and strengthen its economy.

The result is that the United States has exported much of its key manufacturing, is propping up a Europe that should have long ago become self-sufficient while financing the rise of a hostile China intent on toppling the United States as the world’s leading economy.

Administrations of both parties, fearing the political consequences of dealing with a recognized problem, have kicked the can down the road.

But it’s now 2025 and we’re running out of road. Being $36 trillion, in debt, adding to that debt at close to $2 trillion per year while running a $1 trillion international trade deficit isn’t sustainable.

Nor, as we learned in the pandemic, is it strategically advisable to be dependent on hostile foreign nations for pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, etc., etc. Nor has it turned out well to export American middle-class jobs so that we might import cheap consumer goods.

Bottom line: the imbalances that have accumulated over nearly eight decades have become untenable and if not addressed, bad things are going to happen.

So, Trump is taking a huge political gamble – one that presidents of both parties were not willing to take.

It’s a gutsy move. It may cause economic and political pain. But credit Trump with being the one guy with the cajones to do it anyway.

No one said it was going to be easy.

Common sense has become a common theme for President Donald Trump.

So, what exactly is common sense? I think it’s like obscenity. I know it when I see it. For certain, much of what we have suffering from the Left makes a mockery of common sense. Here are some examples.

Does it make sense to allow millions of poor, unskilled, unvetted, social services-consuming immigrants – a meaningful percentage of whom are likely to be criminals or terrorists – into our country?

Does it make sense to cast aside education, training, competence, and natural aptitude in favor of ethnicity and skin color in hiring airline pilots and air traffic controllers? (For that matter, does it make sense for any job?)

Does it make sense for the government to keep borrowing money to spend on things that don’t make the country safer, cleaner, more secure or more prosperous?

Does it make sense to pour billions of dollars into an education system that by every objective measure is failing to educate children?

Does it make sense to force young women who compete in athletics to risk serious injury competing against a bigger, stronger male?

Does it make sense to stand mute while U.S. trade policy has the effect of exporting American jobs and strategic manufacturing capacity to nations that hate us?

No country can call itself sovereign if it doesn’t have a border.

Skin color isn’t the deciding factor in one’s suitability to be an airline pilot (or a butcher, baker or candlestick maker).

You know in your personal life that unlimited borrowing is unsustainable.

What Donald Trump promised in his campaign is a return to common sense. One might substitute the word, “normal.”

For at least the past 60 years, little by little and bit by bit the Left has used language and propaganda and command of the top reaches of the culture to degrade the norms that have been in place since the founding of the nation.

However, the people who live in the heartland of the country who grow our food, stock our shelves, fix our machines, dispose of our trash and defend our shores have finally had enough. So, in 2024, many of them who had voted for Democrats their entire adult lives voted for a Republican named Donald Trump.

Trump is now committing the ultimate mortal sin in politics. He’s keeping his campaign promises. The Left – which includes the legacy media – isn’t having it. Which means, if you voted for Trump, the Left isn’t having you.

Rooting out the crazy and returning to “normal” won’t be quick, smooth or easy. The avalanche of lawsuits against Trump’s executive actions is a portent of frustrations to come. But don’t be distracted. Trump – or something like him – is what we’ve been wishing for.

Temporary setbacks will happen. Lose heart, and one can imagine a broken, dystopic country like that which was devolving under Joe Biden.

But stay the course Trump has mapped and one can imagine a country that regains its success ethic and its cultural health.

How the Left now rolls.

In 2012, Chick Fil-A CEO Dan Cathey expressed his belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The LGBTQ “community” went nuclear and called for boycotting Chick Fil-A.

Sales at Chick Fil-A skyrocketed. Several stores ran out of chicken. The loony-tune left’s childish boycott of Chick Fil-A boomeranged on them big time.

Perhaps this story might prompt you to reconsider your position regarding buying a Tesla. Donald Trump just bought two of them.

It wasn’t that long ago that Tesla was the darling of the Left. So darling was Tesla that Joe Biden wanted to force all of us to either own one or not drive at all. Elon Musk was to the Left a reliable, wealthy, techie-nerd liberal and Tesla vehicles were seen as the salvation of the planet.

But that was before Elon Musk began supporting Donald Trump and went to work in the Trump administration.

Just like that, Elon Musk and his highly successful car company became the embodiment of evil. And now, rather than pushing us to buy a Tesla, far-left liberals are sitting silently as organized, paid activists set Tesla vehicles on fire, sabotage Tesla charging stations and vandalize Tesla dealerships.

An anti-Musk doxing website called “DOGEquest” has reportedly published the personal information of Tesla owners, including their phone numbers and home addresses. They promise to remove the personal information once they receive “convincing evidence” that the owner has repented of sin by having sold his or her Tesla.

If you have heard any prominent Democrat publicly denounce the violence being committed upon Tesla vehicles and dealerships, please drop me a line telling me who, when and where.

Because I haven’t.

Isn’t it true to form that those on the Left – who are oh, so committed to diversity and inclusion and freedom of speech and democracy and the rule of law and all– are the ones prone to political violence?

In 2017, a far-left loon shot and seriously injured Republican representative Steve Scalise as he and colleagues were practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Donald Trump was shot and injured at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and then stalked by a would-be shooter a few weeks later as he was playing golf.

Did anyone on the right shoot at or otherwise try to hurt Kamala Harris? Are the staffs of Democratic lawmakers being doxed by Trump supporters? Has Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or any prominent pundit on the right called for boycotting companies whose CEOs donate heavily to Democrats?

Here’ Rep. Maxine Waters in 2019 calling for the public harassment of Trump’s cabinet.

And if you see anybody from that cabinet, in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them.

No Republican lawmaker would even consider anything similar aimed at Democrats.

What’s happening to Tesla owners and dealers is nothing short of domestic terrorism. But Democrats offer no condemnation. Because deep inside, they’re down with it.

When an organization fails in its mission, the employees lose their jobs.

The Left – which for this discussion includes most Democratic members of Congress, most of the media, and the top leaders at the country’s teachers’ unions – is aghast that the Trump administration just laid off about 1,300 employees at the Department of Education. That’s roughly half the staff.

National Education Association president Becky Pringle’s statement was predictably apocalyptic and predictably predictable. She said:

Firing – without cause – nearly half of the Department of Education staff means they are getting rid of the dedicated public servants who help ensure our nation’s students have access to the programs and resources to keep class sizes down and expand learning opportunities for students so they can grow into their full brilliance. The Trump administration has abandoned students, parents, and educators across the nation.”

Will someone help me here? Can someone please show me how the Department of Education has been helping American students grow into their “full brilliance?” Because the data I read says that reading, math scores and overall educational attainment scores have been in freefall since the Department of Education was created under Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Most Americans alive today don’t remember when American public education was the envy of the world. American public schools, under the control of the citizens in the communities that they served (that’s why we persist in calling them “independent” school districts in Texas), did an amazing job turning out young adults that were competent in math, English, history, geography, and the basic sciences.

That was then.

America now ranks fourth in the world – behind Luxembourg, Norway and Iceland – in education spending per pupil yet ranks a dismal 31^st in student achievement.

Emblazoned at the top of the Department of Education website you’ll see the words, “Fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” The part about “equal access” harkens back to the vestiges of discrimination against black students that still existed in 1979. Let’s leave that discussion for another time and for now agree that “fostering educational excellence” is simply not happening.

What is happening is that the Department of Education is passing out money. Gobs of it. Just for the exercise I clicked on the “Grants and Programs” tab on the department website. That’s where I found the link to the “Asian American and Pacific Islander Data Disaggregation Initiative.” (No, I have no idea what that means.)

So, I dug a little deeper and learned that this program works, “…in consortia with local educational agencies to obtain and evaluate disaggregated data on English Learner AAPI subpopulations…” (Rule of thumb. If a federal program can’t be explained in plain English, the program is very likely a total waste of money.)

But with due respect to “data disaggregation” and all, the Department of Education cost $268 billion in 2024 and yet American kids can’t read or do math at grade level. Since its establishment in 1979, the DOE has, by any objective measure, failed to improve education in America.

If half the employees just got laid off, we should ask, “When will the rest get their pink slips?”

A great country should expect better.

Since President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, much has been written and said about the Democrats’ childish behavior in the House chamber. I kept picturing a two-year-old flinging her cereal bowl from the tray of her highchair. It was all embarrassing, beneath the dignity of the institution and ultimately pointless.

Others have given a detailed recounting. Permit me only to add that I lament that Al Greene is from Texas.

Instead, let’s just say that if you can’t applaud for bringing a moment of sunshine into the life of a 13-year-old boy who otherwise lives under the constant dark cloud of brain cancer, there’s something truly wrong with you.

So long as Democrats keep doubling down on stupid with their silly tantrums and their ad nauseum characterizations of Trump as Hitler and his supporters as racist, bigoted, homophobic, uncultured Neanderthals, the prospects for Republican electoral success will be bright. The Democrats’ far left lunacy may still play well in the cloistered coastal enclaves where elite liberals tend to cluster. But it appalls people in the heartland of the country. Democrats are losing the people who feed us, defend us, fix our machines, stock our shelves, clean up after us, pay their taxes and do their best to raise responsible children. Many in that great middle-of-the-country, middle-of-the-political-road-cohort once voted Democrat. It was their votes for Donald Trump that made the critical difference last November.

Conservative pundits might look upon the Democrats’ self-immolation as good news. And in the short term, they’re probably right.

But in the bigger picture – the picture that includes the long-term health of the republic – I’m one who looks upon the Democrats and wishes they’d get better.

A healthy society needs robust competition in the marketplace of ideas. Businesses and organizations that don’t face worthy competition become complacent and lazy. Political parties that lack principled competition become vulnerable to their own excesses.

The Dallas Cowboys of the mid 1990s were certainly great because they had great players and a great coach. (His name was Jimmy Johnson, Jerry. He’d likely have won you many more championships if you hadn’t childishly run him off.) But the 1990s Cowboys were also great because they knew they had to face the San Francisco 49ers.

I remember the Democratic Party that was once the party of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joe Lieberman. Democrats of that era may have been wrong in the eyes of their Republican opponents. But those Democrats were principled in their positions and the Sturm & Drang of politics notwithstanding, largely decorous in their pursuit of them.

And by and large, the country thrived.

That Democratic Party is long gone. In its place are the glum faces, pink dresses, idiotic protest paddles and foaming-at-the-mouth outbursts of Tuesday night.

It’s hard not to take delight watching the Democrats dig their hole even deeper. But for Republicans to be at their best, and for the nation to truly hit its peak, I wish the Democrats would get better.

What’s next for the church of Peter?

As I write this, Pope Francis is in a hospital in Rome suffering with pneumonia and kidney failure. That’s not good news for an 88-year-old man. Francis could pull through and I hope he does. But in any case, his papacy will soon be over.

I was standing on a rain-soaked St. Peter’s Square on March 13, 2013, as Jorge Mario Bergoglio was introduced to the world as Pope Francis. A crowd of about 100,000 cheered as he gave his urbi et orbi blessing. All of us in the media scrambled to report that prior to his election, Bergoglio was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Early the next morning I sat in the ABC News Bureau in Rome and wrote the following to wrap up KTBB’s coverage.

I’m not Catholic. I’m a Methodist.

Still, I find myself rooting for the Catholic Church. Everyone who professes a Christian faith is descended from the church in Rome. For all the faults of the Roman Church, and they are numerous, at its core the Catholic Church has been an institution dedicated to elevating humans that they might become more worthy of their belief in having been created in God’s own image. The Christian faith in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, has, among other things, chastened its believers. The authority of the church mitigated the baser instincts of man. The teachings of the church have sought to summon our better angels.

As the church has forfeited moral authority due to ineptitude and self-inflicted wounds such as the clergy abuse scandals, nothing really good has rushed in to fill the resulting vacuum.

I also believe that to the extent that the Roman Church suffers a loss of respect, that loss of respect negatively impacts all Christian congregations. For most of the world, Catholicism is Christianity.

Thus, I wish Pope Francis well. I’d like to see the Catholic Church get some of its mojo back.”

The sad fact is that my wish was not granted.

I went on to say the morning after the election that Job One for the new pope was to re-evangelize Europe with an eye toward the same thing for the United States.

Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”

Much to my disappointment, too much of Francis’s preaching centered not on the gospels but on secular leftist causes such as climate change, transgenderism and unfettered illegal immigration. Pride flags and BLM flags in the sanctuaries of Catholic and other Christian churches served to distract from the dwindling numbers of parishioners in the pews.

European governments are now trying to figure out what to do about their own illegal immigration problem.

The fear is that Francis has packed the College of Cardinals with like-minded leftists who are likely to select another leftist pope.

The hope is that just as it did in our recent election, the pendulum will swing the other way.

For the sake of Christendom and the world, let’s pray that it does.

Directly over the target.

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Given the amount of fire he’s taking, we can be certain that Elon Musk is directly over the target. In addition to having ignited a wave of howling by enraged Democrats over his upending of the waste and corruption at the United States Agency for International Development ($2 million for sex change surgeries and “LGBTQ activism” in Guatemala anyone?), Musk has uncovered breathtaking sloppiness and massive fiscal irresponsibility at the Treasury Department.

That’s not all. He’s all over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling for it to be shut down because it is operating without congressionally approved funding, and it is promulgating banking regulations that have the perverse effect of making credit and financial services harder to obtain for low-income consumers.

Everywhere he shows up, he finds staggering levels of waste, inefficiency and fraud on the part of the federal government that we pay for and that is supposed to be working for us.

You’d think that rooting out waste and fraud would be enjoy bipartisan support. But no. Democrats are beside themselves. Here’s Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, (a Native American descendant, just ask her), shrieking about Elon Musk at a small public rally Monday.

This is like a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarms just before he strolls into the lobby.”

Yeah, Liz, that’s it. It’s not that billions of dollars taken from the paychecks of those hard-working low income and middle-class taxpayers you say you’re all about are being wasted in the most grotesque ways possible. It’s that Elon Musk – the richest man in the world – is trying to steal from them. In fact, it’s the Leviathan state that Democrats so strongly favor that is stealing, and in ways that no one has dared to imagine until now.

You sometimes have to ask, can these people hear themselves?

In the case of Musk’s criticisms of the Treasury Department, rather than saying, “Wow it looks like the Treasury is long overdue for an audit,” attorneys general from 19 blue states filed suit in Federal Court for the Southern District of New York – a friendly venue for Democrats. The judge, Obama appointee Paul Engelmayer, issued an order blocking access by Musk and the DOGE team to the Treasury payments system.

The order essentially says that only permanent federal bureaucrats can have access. Mere “political appointees” cannot. Never mind that the Secretary of the Treasury is a political appointee. The ruling is ridiculous on its face. The Treasury secretary can look at anything at the Department of the Treasury that he wants. And so can anyone else appointed by the president – say, for example, Elon Musk.

God bless Elon Musk and God bless Trump for appointing him to this role. All of us who pay taxes take have long known that we are, to some degree or another, being ripped off. But Democrats are panicking because we’re all about to find out that it is many, many, many orders of magnitude worse than we thought.

Let the sunlight in.

How dare we even presume to ask.

How dare anyone – least of all someone dispatched by Donald Trump – presume to investigate how our tax money gets spent. That’s exactly what Elon Musk – the richest man in the world – is doing and the Democrats are coming unglued.

Elon Musk is working for the Trump administration gratis and is heading up an ad hoc government…agency?, committee?, initiative?… call it whatever, it goes by “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency. It’s not really a department in the strictest sense of the word but it doesn’t matter. Elon Musk is busy bringing to light the federal government’s horrific stewardship of our money. And right now, he’s focused on the United States Agency for International Development – a.k.a USAID.

Like most federal programs, USAID started with great intentions. President John F. Kennedy wanted to organize US foreign aid under a single agency. The agency’s principal mandate was to provide disaster and poverty relief to nations around the world who might otherwise have sought such relief from the Soviet Union – and in so doing fall under Soviet domination.

But also like most federal programs, USAID has mutated into something far removed from its founding vision.

And Elon Musk is on it.

Space is simply too short for an exhaustive listing of the ways USAID is wasting your money (while mocking your core values). But here’s a short list.

• $446,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal.
• $3.3 million to “normalize being LGBTQ” in the Caribbean.
• How about this gem: $1 million to help disabled people in Tajikistan to become “climate leaders.”
• 3.6 billion condoms having a price tag of $118.6 million spread about to 60 countries around the world.
• $55,750 for a presentation—led by female and LGBTQ+ journalists—warning about the impact of “climate change” in Argentina.
• $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatamala.

The list never ends. And it is truly astonishing how much of it is tied in one way or another to either sex or climate change. And it’s equally astonishing how little of it is tied to disaster relief, poverty relief or indeed anything connected to American national interest.

When did you vote for any of this crap? When did Obama or Biden or Bush or Clinton or anybody tell us this was going on?

As for the Democrats, their attitude is, “How dare we question it?” Here’s a short montage of them melting down Wednesday over Elon Musk asking on our behalf.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) We will see you in the courts and Congress and the streets. Elon Musk is a Nazi nepo baby.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) It is time for us to shine. It is time for us to be heard. It is time for us to make sure that they know that we will not go.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) In the building behind me. Elon Musk is seizing power from the American people. We are here to fight back.

This is what now passes for policy debate among Democrats.

So, bottom line, stop and consider this. USAID is one agency. There are hundreds.

It’s probably a good thing that Elon Musk sleeps at the office.

We’ve only just begun.

Most Americans do not favor open borders.

Most Americans do not favor hiring based on race, gender or sexual orientation, preferring hiring and advancement based on merit instead. Affirmative action going back to when it first emerged under John F. Kennedy, has never enjoyed majority support.

Many Americans like their electric vehicles. But most of us oppose being told we have to either drive one or not drive at all.

Most Americans believe that the federal government is too big and too intrusive.

Most of us oppose biological men competing in women’s sports. And by a very large margin, most of us are appalled at the very thought of mutilating children via gender surgery.

Speaking of children, most of us believe that sex education of any kind – straight, gay, trans or whatever – has no place in kindergarten.

Most of us believe that criminals should be punished, with the severity of the punishment rising proportionately to the seriousness of the crime. We, most of us, further believe that arrested suspects that have a clear propensity for repeat offense should at the very minimum have to post bail to be let out of jail pending trial.

Most of us believe – indeed the core principles upon which our nation was founded state – that justice should be blind and that using the justice system to persecute political enemies threatens the very foundation of the republic.

These positions stand solidly in the mainstream of American ethos.

And yet…

Millions of poor, social services-dependent migrants are in the country illegally, most of them having arrived in just the past four years.

Hiring, contracting and college admissions based on immutable characteristics like race or gender have crowded out merit in major companies and top universities across the country.

Repeat offenders are walking the streets of our major cities.

That the Department of Justice was weaponized by the Obama and Biden administrations for political purposes is now indisputable.

The federal government has gotten bigger and more intrusive with each successive administration (save for the deregulation push of Trump’s first term).

Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election we’d all still be looking at being eventually forced to buy an electric vehicle, the blatant unfairness of men competing in women’s sports would be continuing apace, government would continue to grow and we’d have little recourse against leftist educrats pushing sex onto our grade schoolers.

Mainstream as we normals believe ourselves to be, it is undeniable that a small group of elitists living mostly on the coasts have been very successful at advancing hard left policies that defy majority opinion.

And that’s why we have been so giddy watching Donald Trump move with amazing speed to unravel the far left lunacy of the cosmically awful Biden administration.

Being happy right now is fine. But as my dad used to say, don’t get cocky.

The committed leftists that pushed these radical policies so successfully for so long have not gone away. They do not intend to surrender. They are momentarily on the back foot following Trump’s decisive victory. But they will regroup.

The fight’s not over.

It’s just begun.

Wasted legacy.

From a technique standpoint, the legacy network news operations – ABC, CBS, NBC (and let’s throw in CNN) – are all very good at what they do. They have, over most of a century, become extremely skilled at gathering huge quantities of news audio and video and distilling it into highly watchable and highly listenable news stories.

They do it every single day and they do it on a tight deadline. From the perspective of tradecraft, America’s legacy network newsrooms are the best in the world.

To fully appreciate that tradecraft one must see it. From political conventions across five presidential administrations to two papal conclaves at the Vatican, I have personally watched the legacy networks in action. I have been there as radio and television assignment editors, reporters, videographers, editors and anchors have worked with astonishing proficiency to put out a great looking and great sounding product.

For decades those superior skills – together with the undeniable fact that collectively speaking the legacy networks were the only game in town – garnered huge audiences. Those huge audiences assured superior access to newsmakers and preferred positions at big news events.

Certainly, the confluence of social media and smartphones has acted as a disintermediating force that has disrupted the legacy networks. Where once it took a mountain of expensive infrastructure to get a story from New York or Washington or Rome or London into cars and homes, today anyone on the scene with a smartphone can be a reporter.

But with that said, the advantages gained by the long and massive incumbency of the legacy networks should have been more protective than it has turned out to be. Sure, anyone can now be a reporter. But the vast majority of people lack the skills to report a story compellingly and the long history to report it credibly.

I said should have been more protective. It hasn’t been because the legacy networks – as if acting intentionally – forfeited their credibility. Secure in the belief that they would always enjoy top-tier status, they morphed from doing their best to report the day’s events to doing their best to shape the day’s events. And they did it from a monolithically leftist perspective.

The resulting “news” product has become an orchestrated effort to advance a predetermined liberal narrative. It has also become drippingly condescending and utterly dismissive of the fundamental beliefs and morals of at least half the country.

The audience has responded by abandoning the legacy networks in droves. Joe Rogan’s podcast alone reaches nearly as many consumers as the legacy networks combined.

Given that today we have countless news reporting sources and given that it’s hard to know the respective agendas of those sources, it would be nice if we could look to the legacy guys as a reliable source.

But rather than properly leveraging their incumbency, they have instead consciously substituted political activism in place of traditional journalism and in so doing, become embarrassingly irrelevant.

It’s a terrible waste of skill, talent and expertise. And it’s a terrible disservice to the republic.

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