A basic truth is that nothing stays the same. This is true for any individual or any nation. Each day, you are not the same person you were yesterday. Either you are moving forward or backward. Either you are improving or deteriorating. I often quote historian Arnold Toynbee that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” I bring this up because it is an important reminder. Think of the Greeks, the Romans, or the British Empire on which the sun never set. Regardless of what you may think about MAGA, President Donald Trump is a political figure of historic proportions—someone who never ran for or held political office, twice being elected to nonconsecutive terms as president. Why? Because the sentiment of MAGA touches what Americans know is true. Something is wrong. Crucial factors that drove American greatness are getting lost. Americans feel it. Polls tell us. Ongoing dismal numbers regarding satisfaction with the state of the nation, national pride, confidence in every major institution of the country. Now the point: the current government shutdown. What is happening? The Democratic Party is up against the wall. It stands for everything that is destroying the country. If MAGA means we’re in trouble and we need to fix what is broken, the message of Democrats is nothing is broken and we must continue on the same path. What is the same path? That every problem the country faces, every challenge each American citizen faces, can be dispensed with by more government, more programs, more spending. But if more government and more spending is the problem, not the solution, Democrats are in great political trouble. And this is what is happening. The sign of economic health is economic growth. Growth is what creates new jobs, new opportunities, drives down costs, and drives up income and wealth. As I often quote, the average real growth of the U.S. economy was 3.64% annually for the half century from 1950 to 2000. The average from 2000 to 2025 is one-third less at 2.2%. Why? Government is sucking up more and more of our economy. In 1950, the federal government consumed 14.2% of gross domestic product; in 2000, 17.5%; in 2024, 23%. Government produces nothing. The more government takes, the more our resources are diverted from productive uses to nonproductive uses. Worse, this inexorable growth of government has been on the sly. Rather than going directly to the American people and raising taxes to finance all government spending honestly, this was not done because it is political suicide. Ongoing multitrillion-dollar deficits are financed with debt—shifting the tax burden to future generations. So, federal government debt has now reached $37 trillion, more than 20% greater than projections for our 2025 GDP—$30.5 trillion. Is it any wonder that our youth are confused and disillusioned? Democratic leadership knows they are between a rock and a hard place. So, they huddled to come up with some clever way to scare the American people to push for more government. The hot button they chose was health care. We’re all concerned about making health care delivery more efficient. But Democrats want to continue the distortions. As Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center notes, quoting the Paragon Institute, “In 2014, taxpayers covered 68% of Obamacare premiums. By 2020, that figure had risen to 80%” and “taxpayers now cover 93% of [Obamacare] premiums.” Donna Brazile, former Democratic National Committee chair and veteran of numerous Democratic presidential campaigns, proposes in a recent article in The Hill more cute word games that Democrats should employ to hide the truth. Democrats, she advises, should say they stand for “affordability.” But what Democrats mean by “affordability” is use of government subsidies to disguise true costs. Our country needs reality and truth. We’re going broke and need to restore freedom, markets, and efficiencies. This is what made America great. And this is how to Make America Great Again. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Shutdown Is Smoke Screen for a Democratic Party Bankrupt of Ideas appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Sunrise Movement just announced a strategic pivot. No longer content to focus primarily on climate change, its leaders now declare their mission is to “stop authoritarianism.” In practice, this means fewer conversations about the environment and more mobilizations against President Donald Trump. Notorious for their full-throated endorsement of the Green New Deal, Sunrise activists regularly protested in prominent congressional offices, most infamously confronting former Sen. Joe Manchin and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Although the group’s tactics have garnered significant attention, its policy goals have hit a brick wall. For those of us who’ve been watching, this redirection comes as no surprise. Sunrise was never truly about the environment—it was about politics. The Green New Deal was less a conservation plan than a vehicle for reshaping the economy along progressive lines, even including provisions guaranteeing universal health care. While it admitted as much then, it is declaring it now: shifting resources from climate to partisan fights under the banner of “saving democracy.” This should be a wake-up call for anyone who still believes that America’s environmental future can be entrusted to the professional activist class. For too long, conservatives have been told that the only way to care about clean air, water, and lands is to accept the Left’s package deal of mandates, subsidies, and ideological litmus tests. Sunrise has now ripped the mask off: The environment was never its end goal. But the environment is our goal. That’s why conservative environmentalists have consistently pushed back against Sunrise’s agenda. We are unapologetically conservative and unapologetically committed to stewardship. We believe that protecting the natural world is an American cause, rooted in the values of responsibility, freedom, and legacy. Our vision doesn’t require sacrificing economic strength or personal liberty. Instead, it embraces solutions that keep our air and water clean, reduce waste and emissions, and preserve what makes America strong. When environmental groups abandon conservation to chase political clout, they leave a vacuum. If conservatives don’t fill that vacuum, no one will. We cannot allow the Left to define what caring for the environment means. Nor can we allow groups like Sunrise to rewrite the script so that climate is merely a pawn in their larger war against the right. The conservative movement has a choice: We can either cede the ground, or we can reclaim leadership on one of the most fundamental responsibilities any society has—the responsibility to leave our nation stronger, healthier, and more secure for the next generation. We’ve made our choice. We are building a movement that doesn’t silo conservation but integrates it into the broader fabric of conservative priorities: energy independence, strong communities, resilient agriculture, and a healthy future for American families. We don’t claim to be ideologically neutral—but we are committed to results. We don’t hide our perspective. We come to the table as conservatives because that’s what makes our environmental work durable and impactful. Because if conservatives don’t lead on the environment, we already know what fills the gap. Sunrise may have abandoned its mission. We won’t. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Sunrise Proves the Point: Conservatives Must Lead on the Environment appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The aerobic freakout has begun inside the liberal media over the new owners of CBS News appointing “anti-woke” Bari Weiss to the new post of editor-in-chief. None of the CBS veterans want a new boss with a new ideology. They like pretending they don’t have an ideology. They call themselves courageously “independent.” Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison wants to put CBS News firmly in the middle: “We want CBS to speak to that 70% of the audience that would really define themselves as center-left to center-right.” >>>See also: Liberal Bias Tarnishing What Once Was Journalistic Gold Standard of ‘60 Minutes’ In her initial memo to employees, Weiss stated several principles that are absolute anathema inside CBS: “Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and “Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.” Bari Weiss speaks onstage at a book club event on Nov. 19 in New York City. (Noam Galai/Getty Images) The anonymous leakers are already on fire. Jeremy Barr of The Guardian spread the early spurts: “CBS News veterans I’ve talked to are encouraging Bari Weiss to not mess with the Golden Goose(s) of ’60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS News Sunday Morning.’” What makes them “golden”? They’re the opposite of the Weiss principles. They rely on a narrow spectrum of ideas and persistently favor one political party over another. “60 Minutes” is notoriously pro-Democrat, from Steve Kroft trying to save Bill Clinton‘s 1992 campaign from the early adultery charges of his mistress, Gennifer Flowers, to Kroft performing a series of blatantly promotional interviews with Barack Obama, starting in 2008. President Donald Trump exposed Lesley Stahl for what she didn’t put on the air during their interview in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign. She huffed that there was no way to verify that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of potentially devastating Biden family influence-peddling evidence was real. Then the media verified it … in 2022, with Joe Biden safely elected. In 2022, Scott Pelley did the Kroft spit-and-polish interview with President Biden. He cooked up gooey gushers like this one: “You have lived a long life of triumph and tragedy. In November, you’ll be 80. And I wonder what it is that keeps you in the arena.” We know part of the answer: He was kept in the arena by powerful White House aides who were actually running America and who easily manipulated the partisan journalists to fall in line. CBS infuriated the troops by settling with Trump over their sappy interviews with Biden and Kamala Harris. Previous CBS chair Shari Redstone told The New York Times that CBS employees warned her that in October 2023, when Pelley scored a second softball session with Biden, the president had seemed “drowsy and had to be prodded to answer.” She worried that CBS might be accused of “editing the interview to conceal Mr. Biden’s failings.” Biden’s doddering was still apparent on air, but imagine what Team Pelley edited out. It’s been a very long time since CBS was aiming for an audience that was “center-left to center-right.” They’ve been trying to drag everyone to the left, even in the so-called glory days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. CBS loved the Kennedys, but it despised Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Bushes, who never wanted to upset a liberal journalist, learned just how much Dan Rather hated them. Can CBS actually move to the center? And will that expose how tilted the other networks are every day? It must be a terrifying prospect for the badly named “mainstream media.” Because merely adding Democrat scandals and policy failures to the definition of “newsworthiness” is a nightmare, a concept they refuse to accept. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Furious Freakout Over a New Centrist Strategy at CBS News appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House is exposing Democrats’ efforts to give illegal immigrants access to health care under the Biden administration, according to a memo obtained by The Daily Signal. “This memo discusses specific actions taken by the Biden administration to provide Obamacare and Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants,” the document says. President Donald Trump’s administration issued the memo on the seventh day of the government shutdown, which Republicans say has been caused by Senate Democrats’ unwillingness to pass a clean budgetary continuing resolution that doesn’t restore funding of health care for illegal immigrants. The memo describes “how federal resources were abused by the Biden administration and Democratic states to provide health care for illegal immigrants.” According to the memo, “14 states and the District of Columbia operate ‘state-funded’ health care programs for illegal immigrants.” They are California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is currently reviewing and auditing eight of those states. The memo says it is well-documented that California exploited a federal loophole to fund its “state- funded” Medicaid program for illegal immigrants, but “a broader program-integrity concern persists with the existence of such programs in states that operate them.” For example, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General found that in less than one year, California had improperly claimed $52.7 million in federal Medicaid funds for coverage of illegal immigrants. That occurred because California did not appropriately segregate funding for emergency Medicaid from non-emergency Medicaid. The White House named Obamacare allowing states to waive certain provisions of the law as another example of a Democrat policy enabling illegal immigrants to get federally funded health care. “The Biden administration approved numerous state waivers to allow illegal immigrants access to health insurance coverage, waiving the statutory prohibition against illegal immigrants enrolling in Obamacare plans, thus expanding health care to illegal immigrants,” the memo outlines. The waivers allow federal dollars to be used to subsidize coverage for illegal immigrants both directly and indirectly, the White House says. States with waivers that reduce federal spending on Obamacare subsidies receive funds known as “pass-through” payments. These are intended to represent the difference between federal spending on Obamacare subsidies in the absence of the waiver and federal spending on Obamacare subsidies under the waiver. However, federal pass-through payments have been used to provide subsidies for the illegal immigrants made eligible for coverage under a waiver, the memo says. “In addition, when federal ‘pass-through’ funds are used by a state through programs intended to buy down the cost of premiums for all exchange consumers, like reinsurance programs, illegal immigrants with plans benefiting from such premium reductions are effectively receiving a premium subsidy with federal funds,” according to the memo. The White House listed instances in the Democrat-run states of Colorado, Maryland, and Washington as examples of waivers providing health care benefits to illegal immigrants. Medicaid spending on emergency services for illegal immigrants nearly tripled under the Biden administration, growing from $3.07 billion in fiscal year 2020 to $9.12 billion in fiscal year 2024, the memo says. Medicaid law requires states to provide a 90-day grace period, known as a “reasonable opportunity period,” for states to verify the immigration status of applicants into the program. While states traditionally had the ability to limit the number of reasonable opportunity periods an individual could receive before verifying their immigration status to remain eligible for Medicaid benefits, the memo says, President Joe Biden prevented states from limiting the number of reasonable opportunity periods an individual may receive if they reapply for Medicaid at the end of each period, according to the White House. “This action prevented states from requiring Medicaid applicants to verify their immigration status, creating an easily exploitable loophole through which illegal immigrants could receive federally funded coverage,” the memo says. The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Memo Exposes Democrats’ History of Pushing Health Care for Illegal Immigrants appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Israel and Hamas have reached a peace deal, President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening announced on his social media platform Truth Social.  “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” Trump wrote.   “This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed-upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” the president continued. “All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”   Hamas and Israel are expected to sign the agreement Thursday, which will include the immediate release of the remaining 20 living hostages still in Gaza and an immediate ceasefire, according to The Times of Israel.  “With God’s help, we will bring them all home,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on the social media platform X immediately after Trump announced the deal.   In addition to the 20 living hostages, the remains of 28 other hostages remain in Gaza. On Thursday, Netanyahu said, he will “convene the government to approve the agreement and bring all our dear hostages home.”  “I thank the heroic soldiers of the [Israel Defense Forces] and all the security forces, thanks to whose courage and sacrifice we have reached this day,” he said. “I thank from the depths of my heart President Trump and his team for their mobilization for this sacred mission of releasing our hostages.”   “With the help of the Almighty, together we will continue to achieve all our goals and expand peace with our neighbors,” the prime minister added.   The agreement to the first phase of the deal comes about 10 days after Trump presented a 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza, disarm Hamas, and bring all the hostages home. Israel accepted Trump’s full plan, and Hamas accepted parts of the plan, but said “details” needed to be negotiated.   Mediators from the U.S., Turkey, and Qatar have been in Egypt for three days working to reach a deal both Israel and Hamas could agree to. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who worked to broker the Abraham Accords, arrived in Egypt late Tuesday night alongside Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. Kushner’s arrival was reported to indicate that a deal was close to being reached.   During a press conference at the White House on Wednesday, Trump indicated he may travel to the Middle East himself this week. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has invited Trump to Egypt for the signing of the peace deal.  Pro-Israel advocate Aviva Klompas celebrated the news, writing on X, there are “intense and emotional days ahead—but for now, the weight feels just a little bit lighter.”   Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, praised Netanyahu, Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for their work to reach a deal to end the war and bring the hostages home, but celebrated the news with caution.   “This deal offers a path forward, but only if Hamas honors its commitments,” Pfluger said. “We remain vigilant and eager to see this agreement implemented completely.”  This is a developing story and will be updated.   The post BREAKING: Trump Announces Israel-Hamas Deal Reached   appeared first on The Daily Signal.