Clawing Back the Culture
It was an epic confrontation. In political circles, it will be talked about for generations.
President Trump stood below the famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln, painted by George P. A. Healy in 1869, donated to the White House in 1939, and hanging above the mantel in the State Dining Room ever since. On Lincoln’s face is grief at the war between the Confederate states and the national government. On Trump’s is disdain.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills, D, told him to his face that she’ll go to court rather than comply with Trump’s Executive Order banning biological men from women’s sports. She called this part of her mission to “comply with state and federal laws.”
“We are the federal law,” Trump replied. “Your population, even though it is somewhat liberal — although I did very well there — doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports.”
“See you in court,” said the governor.
“That’ll be an easy one,” said Trump. “I wish you luck, you better do it, or your state is not going to get any federal funding. Every state has a legal obligation to enforce Title IX. We’re going to protect our citizens.”
All over the country, similar confrontations are playing out between gender orthodoxy and common sense conservatism, between biased local judges and the constitutional power of the solitary executive. These cases are the trench warfare of identity politics, with Dems slamming the Commander in Chief, defending 72 genders, clinging to the cause of transgenderism no matter how many children are harmed for life.
In DC Friday, the Bondi Justice Department filed an ethics complaint against District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Uruguayan-born American lawyer nominated by President Biden, the first openly LGBT judge on the court. She belittled the Justice Department lawyers defending Trump’s EO to stop transgenders from serving in the US military, telling one to sit down because he was a graduate of the University of Virginia law school and they are all ‘liars and lack integrity.’ From the complaint: “The judge asked the attorney what Jesus would say to telling a group of people that they are so worthless, so worthless that we're we're not going to allow them into homeless shelters.” The government lawyer responded, “The United States is not going to speculate about what Jesus would have to say about anything.”
A few weeks earlier, US District Judge John Bates ordered federal health agencies to restore web pages they had pulled after a Trump executive order recognizing only two genders, male and female. Within days, the conservative mediasphere discovered that his wife, Carol Rhees, started a nonprofit called Hope for Children in Ethiopia, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants from USAID, one of the earliest targets of DOGE. Posted Elon Musk, “No kidding. Yet another corrupt judge.”
And the House Judiciary Committee has demanded documents from Loren Merchan, president of Authentic Campaigns Inc., and a former Kamala Harris staffer, as to how much money she raised for Democrat causes during the 2024 campaign, as her father, Judge Juan Merchan, held Donald Trump under a gag order in his hush money case.
Local judges are not alone in clutching their pearls over change. The legacy media, hemorrhaging viewers so quickly that their premier race-baiter Joy Reid was fired during Black History Month, has not abandoned its core mission of making up stories and then finding pollsters and “experts” to validate them. Consider this one:
The NYTimes, once a newspaper, “reported” that disgruntled voters were showing up at the town halls of GOP congressmen, a wave of buyers’ remorse. The protestors were sent by the DNC, its chair admitted on MSNBC, for the express purpose of spinning this narrative. Then they must have hired pollsters to find “evidence” of this Trump disaffection, because Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov claimed that Trump was losing support, according to pollsters. This is a play on Nancy Pelosi’s “Wrap Up Smear” tactic — manufacture a story, feed it to the press, and watch the smear spread. They call it news, but it is manipulation, for partisan gain. Check this out, from Atlanta.
No single Executive Order can eviscerate the damage done by our culture’s embrace of transgender, environmental or pro-Hamas extremism. Clawing back the talons of these cultural cancers, excavating the poison from every crevice of our society — from corporations like Costco clinging to their racist DEI policies to universities attaching themselves to their pro-Hamas tenets (hello Columbia U) to blue cities and states riddled with green kickback schemes — will take time.
President Trump knows this.
In his address to the governors and their spouses the night after the confrontation with Gov. Mills, he called for unity. “I am open to anybody, Republican or Democrat, we’ll take care of you. We’re not Republican or Democrat, we are American executives. You have great talent on the other side.” Quoting George Washington, “the great unifier,” Trump said, “Maybe this is the evening we unite and fight for our country.”
But in his address to CPAC celebrating his first 30 days in office, an appeal to the MAGA base, he threw in a line from John Paul Jones, a leader of the Navy during the Revolutionary Wat. The quote, then and now: “I have not yet begun to fight.”