The Washington Swamp and its leftist allies are foaming at the mouth with rage and indignation against President Trump and Elon Musk. They just can’t believe that the little fiefdoms they have created over the decades and the billions of dollars they controlled are being systematically dismantled and taken away from them.
 
While the left fights to stop Musk in the courtrooms around the country, it has a new strategy for the court of public opinion. They are lying in order to frighten you. They want you to be scared of the “bad orange man” and his sidekick, the “malevolent Mr. Musk.”
 
So, now we’re getting breathless reporting on headlines like this: “‘Five Alarm Warning’: Possible DOGE Access To Private Taxpayer Data Sparks Outcry.”
 
It’s total nonsense.
 
Thousands of unelected federal bureaucrats already have access to all of your personal financial information because you gave it to them! That’s how the IRS processes your tax returns. Musk and his team will have no more access to your private data than any of the thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats currently do.
 
One of the things the media have been doing to Donald Trump for several years is so-called “fact-checking” in a news story. Now, they’re doing the same thing to Musk.
 
They will say, “Elon Musk and President Trump are claiming, without evidence, that they found massive fraud at the Education Department.” The same outlets will also say, “Elon Musk is going to gain access to your Social Security number and use it for his personal gain.”
 
There’s no evidence or proof of that charge, but the media repeat it in order to scare you.
 
Well, we know tax information has been abused, not by Elon Musk, but by IRS bureaucrats. Do we really need to remind anyone about how the Obama/Biden IRS targeted conservative groups? Or how Donald Trump’s tax returns were leaked to left-wing media outlets?
 
The fact that the left-wing media, left-wing Democrats in Congress, and left-wing bureaucrats are trying to scare you to death in order to protect their waste and corruption tells you everything you need to know.
 
Here’s the other big lie.
 
There have been four plane crashes in the one month that Donald Trump has been in office. Some pundits and politicians are claiming that these crashes are the result of Trump’s cutbacks and incompetence. They are politicizing tragedies that have nothing to do with Trump’s policies.
 
There have been no firings of air traffic controllers. Donald Trump is trying to hire more of them. The shortage of air traffic controllers that we have was caused by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Democrats in Congress insisting that air traffic controllers had to meet certain racial and sexual identity quotas.
 
Here’s what was on the Biden FAA’s website under “diversity and inclusion:”
 
“Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the Federal government … has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
 
Really? Are many people with these disabilities applying to be air traffic controllers?
 
Here are the facts.
 
The first crash occurred at Reagan Airport the day after Trump’s transportation secretary was confirmed. So, he just took office and immediately caused a plane crash?
 
Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, failed to upgrade our air traffic control system. In addition, he saw racism everywhere, including in highway construction.
 
 
 
Free Speech Under Siege
 
Who knew that the freedom of speech could be the issue that ends up breaking the U.S.-European alliance, as well as becoming an irreconcilable difference in America itself?
 
European officials were outraged after Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the mildest of critiques of Europe’s slouching toward authoritarianism.
 
The German diplomat who led the Munich Security Conference where Vance spoke gave his closing remarks over the weekend. He said, “After the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.”
 
When he started to elaborate, he lost control, broke down crying like a child, and left the stage. He wept because America’s current government would not buy into the idea that censorship is a good thing.
 
CBS News interviewed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday. Host Margaret Brennan claimed that the Holocaust was caused by free speech. The Nazi mass murder of Jews, according to Brennan, was the result of free speech being “weaponized to conduct a genocide.” Please, Margaret – read a book!
 
There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. The Nazis took it away, and Nazi thugs beat anyone who attempted to engage in free speech. Censorship was imposed! The only speech allowed was the government’s speech. The lack of free speech not only made the Holocaust possible, it made it difficult to find out for sure if it was even taking place.
 
 
 
Vance Was Right
 
CBS “journalists” with “60 Minutes” followed German police during a raid on someone’s home. What was the crime? Was this a member of ISIS suspected of planning a terror attack? No, the person posted a meme online that someone found offensive.
 
So, German police broke the door down and seized electronic devices with the approval of CBS. They later interviewed German prosecutors whose job is going after people for inappropriate speech on social media. It was the type of polite interview that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance will never get from any “mainstream” American news network.
 
The CBS reporter asked why saying something to someone’s face that is prohibited speech has a lesser punishment than posting prohibited speech on social media. The German officials explained that with spoken words, the offense is over within seconds. But when you post something offensive on social media, the offense is ongoing. So, the penalties are much more severe.
 
Thousands of these prosecutions take place every year in Germany. J.D. Vance was right. This is a level of totalitarianism that would be envied in Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.
 
Unfortunately, as many as half of Americans have bought into the idea that, “I’m in favor of free speech unless it’s misinformation or hate speech.”
 
But even the most cursory thinking would lead you to this conclusion: In order to stop misinformation or hate speech, someone is going to have to determine what is misinformation and hate speech.
 
Obviously, that will be the government. So, you no longer have free speech, you have government-regulated speech, which is the opposite of free speech.
 
Here’s an interesting thought experiment: Would any conservative want a government run by Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deciding what is acceptable speech? Of course not.
 
Would a liberal want conservative political officials to be in charge of what is inappropriate speech? I would assume not, even though we are the ones who would allow their speech.
 
Neither side should want the government controlling speech. They should want the “free market of ideas” to determine what is right and what is wrong. That’s why it is called free speech.
 
 
 
An Early Test
 
Earlier this month, President Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, a Biden appointee who was in charge of an obscure agency. Three days later, Dellinger sued to get his job back, claiming the president could not fire him.
 
A federal judge appointed by Barack Obama reinstated Dellinger and issued a restraining order against President Trump from naming anyone else to assume this position. The Trump administration appealed the ruling, but the appellate court refused to consider the case.
 
So, the Trump Justice Department just filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court. In its emergency appeal, the Trump administration told the justices, “This court should not allow lower courts to seize executive power by dictating to the President how long he must continue employing an agency head against his will.”
 
This case could well be an early test of executive power and the extent to which the president can fire and choose his own executive branch officials.
 
At issue is a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that upheld limits on the president’s authority to fire certain government officials. However, in recent years, the Supreme Court has issued decisions undermining that precedent and expanding the president’s power to fire agency heads.
 
In a 2020 case, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, declared, “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
 
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in which he called the court’s 1935 decision “a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.” Thomas added that he would “repudiate [overturn] what is left of this erroneous precedent.” Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Thomas’s opinion.
 
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will act quickly and enable President Trump to have the agency leaders he needs to implement what the American people elected him to do.