President Donald Trump’s frustration over Democrats’ determination to keep the government shut down led to the president’s call to end the filibuster, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained on “Fox News Sunday.” MIKE JOHNSON: Trump’s Anger Is a Reflection of Our Desperation To Reopen Government@SpeakerJohnson joins Fox News Sunday to talk about President Donald Trump's recent call for an end to the filibuster."I think what you're seeing there is a reflection of his anger—his real… pic.twitter.com/jcWnHRvaCR— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) November 2, 2025 “I think what you’re seeing there is a reflection of his anger—his real frustration—that the government is closed,” Johnson stated. “He is a big-hearted president. He wants everybody to get their services and the health services for veterans and SNAP benefits and all the rest. And he’s tried everything he can, and he is now exhausting his ability. The courts are now saying you can’t go any further. So he’s just desperate for the government to open.” The Nuclear Option Last Thursday on Truth Social, Trump called for Republican senators to “INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,'” and “GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER,” accusing Democrats of going “STONE COLD ‘CRAZY’.” The filibuster allows a Senate minority to delay or block a vote on a bill by requiring a “cloture” vote of 60 senators to end debate and move to a final vote. The president hopes that ending the filibuster would allow Republicans to pass legislation with a simple 51-vote majority, speeding up the approval process.Johnson has been vocally opposed to such a “nuclear solution,” explaining how this move would immediately give Democrats ammunition to pack the Supreme Court and easily ban firearms as soon as they regain power. “We on our side traditionally have resisted that because the worst impulses of the far-left Democrat Party—they would pack the court, they would do all the things the president has discussed there,” Johnson said. However, Trump pointed out last Saturday on Truth Social that “regardless of the Schumer Shutdown, the Democrats will terminate the Filibuster the first chance they get.” “Don’t be WEAK AND STUPID. FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! WIN, WIN, WIN! We will immediately END the Extortionist Shutdown, get ALL of our agenda passed, and make life so good for Americans,” Trump wrote. Democrats so far have rejected 14 times the clean resolution bill proposed by Republicans that would have reopened the government in favor of their own legislation that would allocate more than $1 trillion in free health care for illegal aliens and continue funding Obamacare. “He’s tried everything he can: He’s tried to negotiate with them, he’s pleaded with them, and they’ve still dug their heels in. So, this is a reflection of all of our desperation. We’re angry about it. I think we should be. The filibuster has traditionally been a safeguard against those worst impulses, but we’ll see what the Senate does,” Johnson said. The post Call to End Filibuster Is a Reflection of the President’s Anger, Says Mike Johnson appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The world of climate realism just won a massive victory thanks to Bill Gates, and the long-term results are likely to be seismic. Gates isn’t just the founder of Microsoft, he’s one of the most influential philanthropists alive today. This past week, he firmly rejected the climate alarmism that’s been so pervasive on the Left. To be clear, I’m not saying Gates has rejected the—largely fatuous—idea that there’s a grand “consensus” in science that carbon emissions are warming the planet. I’m also not saying that he’s going to announce a large contribution to the conservative Heartland Institute tomorrow. Gates still seems to drink some of the Kool Aid—he has just significantly diluted his dose. This past week, he openly called for the Climate Industrial Complex to stop obsessing over global temperatures and start to focus on what matters far more: human welfare. If others follow where he leads, this could transform philanthropy in a positive direction, away from alarmist fearmongering and toward actual solutions that improve lives. It may also spell doom for the climate activist groups that long ago abandoned a healthy focus on preserving the earth’s beauty for people to enjoy and instead embraced a worldview that sees human beings as a plague on the earth. What Did Bill Gates Say? Gates published a long essay Tuesday ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP 30, next month, presenting “three tough truths about climate.” He explicitly connected his essay to the problem of ensuring that charitable spending is “delivering the greatest possible impact for the most vulnerable people” and he claimed that the money designated for climate is not being “spent on the right things.” In this context, he delivered a three-part message: “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilization.” “Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate.” “Health and prosperity are the best defense against climate change.” In his essay, Gates urges the climate community “to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare.” He says charities should strive to “ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life, no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into.” In other words, we should stop trying to play God and start using charitable funds where they can make a concrete positive impact for poor people today rather than worrying ourselves silly over decreasing the global temperature 100 years from now. The current agenda of the climate movement often drives policies that make life worse in the here and now and make it harder for the world’s poor to achieve the prosperity that would actually protect them from the threats of climate disaster. Gates rightly mentions the case of Sri Lanka, a developing country in Southeast Asia that “set out to cut emissions by banning synthetic fertilizers.” This policy sparked a famine, and Gates said tragedy resulted because “the government valued reducing emissions above other important things.” The Microsoft founder also notes that “in the past century, direct deaths from natural disasters, such as drowning during a flood, have fallen 90%, between 40,000 and 50,000 people a year, thanks mostly to better warning systems and more-resilient buildings.” He also rightly observes that “excessive cold is far deadlier” than excessively hot weather. Gates does not question the assumption that climate change is a threat, but he suggests that increasing the prosperity of the developing world is a far better solution than obsessing over carbon emissions. He also notes that countries like the U.S. have decreased emissions in recent years, and he celebrates that “green” technologies are becoming less expensive. He suggests that innovation and prosperity, not artificial limits on energy, pave the true path forward. What Does This Mean for America? Gates’ essay poses a fundamental challenge to the massive sector of climate nonprofits. Organizations that once actually focused on protecting nature for human enjoyment now spend the vast majority of their time demonizing fossil fuels and advocating policies that restrict prosperity, not enable it. Thanks to Gates, the donor class that keeps these nonprofits afloat will start asking uncomfortable questions, like how much does advocating for the Green New Deal actually improve the lives of poor people in the U.S. and abroad? Environmentalist groups played a large role in the influence campaign I expose in “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” These groups fed staff and ideas into the Biden administration, weaponizing the administrative state to push climate alarmism on the American people and to fund their pet projects in the name of saving the earth. Many activist groups will keep on spreading alarmism and advocating destructive policies, but Gates’ new direction will at least force these groups to reckon with the fact that your car isn’t causing the end of the world. Earlier this year, the Gates Foundation distanced itself from one of the major arms of the Left’s dark money network, which funds climate activist groups. Now, Gates has launched a powerful salvo against the Climate Industrial Complex. If his message resonates with donors, it may simultaneously weaken the Left’s climate activism and actually help people who need cheaper energy the most. Let’s hope America’s donors are listening. The post Bill Gates’ New Priorities May Trigger a Seismic Shift in Climate Activism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The 2026 midterm elections will undoubtedly be consequential—hence the redistricting scramble in both red and blue states—for the end of President Donald Trump’s second term. In anticipation of those midterms, however, some in Washington have looked past Tuesday’s elections, even though they will set the tone for future elections in the era of Trump. In states across the country, voters will be heading to the polls next week to cast their ballots in state and local elections. New Jersey and Virginia will choose a new governor. New York City and Minneapolis will choose new mayors, as will thousands of other towns and cities across the country. But what can Tuesday night’s results tell us about the midterms to come? On Tuesday night, the temptation for professional and casual election observers alike will be to assume that if more candidates win with Ds next to their names than Rs, Democrats are in the driver’s seat for the midterms, and vice versa.  And forget the fact that in some major races, thanks to the flawed “jungle primary” system, two Democrats are the main contenders, as is the case in New York and Minneapolis mayoral elections.  The truth is that the party identification of Tuesday night’s winners are oftentimes bad predictors of how the chips will fall in the midterms. Take when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, for example. The Virginia gubernatorial election in 1981 went to Democrats and the New Jersey gubernatorial went for Republicans. In the 1982 midterms, Democrats maintained their decades-long hold over the House, picking up 26 seats, but failed to make the gains necessary in the Senate to flip the upper chamber blue. In 1985, however, Virginia once again went blue and New Jersey once again went red. This time Democrats did manage to flip the Senate. Off-year elections in the George W. Bush era also proved a poor predictor of the midterms that followed. The Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections both went blue in 2001 and 2005. In the 2002 midterms, however, Republicans held the House and flipped the Senate. In the 2006 midterms, however, Democrats flipped both chambers. That said, what party prevails in next Tuesday’s election is less important than the kind of politics the respective candidates are engaging in. And what we’ve seen from the American Left is a renewed embrace of radicalism.  When Trump and Republicans prevailed last November, the Democrat party entered an era of soul-searching. Many believed this project was to consider the fact that the Democrat party had taken the side of the 20 on several 80-20 issues, such as men in women’s sports, open borders, and defund the police.  But when they emerged from this conclave, they doubled-down.  In the run-up to these elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has taken the government hostage for a month over health care funding for illegal immigrants as he tried to appease his radical-left base and stave off a suspected primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat nominee for New York City mayor, is a self-proclaimed socialist who wants to “globalize the intifada.” He’s earned the endorsement of Washington’s second-highest ranking Democrat, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, not to mention Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Meanwhile, in Virginia, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, once under the employ of the CIA, has made little attempt to distance herself from Jay Jones, her scandal-ridden Democrat compatriot running for attorney general who said he’d like to see the former Republican speaker of the state house and his family shot and killed. The New Jersey gubernatorial pits Democrat Mikie Sherrill up against Republican Jack Ciattarelli. The corporate media has portrayed Sherrill as some kind of moderate in light of the extremism on display in Virginia and New York, but Sherrill is not inoculated from the woke virus infecting the Democrat party, either. As Scott Hogenson, a public relations executive who lives in Texas, recently wrote for The Daily Signal: Sherrill voted twice—in 2023 and again in 2025—against bills in Congress to ensure that boys and girls sports remain sex segregated. She also voted against legislation requiring schools to inform parents that their children have bought into transgender ideology. It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey have eaten into Democrats’ lead. And while it is becoming increasingly apparent that Mamdani will win the mayoral race in New York City, he’ll do so with a weak plurality because of vote splitting between his two opponents, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa. Each of these races were easily winnable for Democrats—and appeared as much just two months ago. With just days to go before the election, however, it appears that they’ll be real contests, and national Democrats have expended a lot of political capital in keeping it that way. Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome, Democrats have decided that doubling-down on left-wing radicalism is their strategy for 2026. Just like in 2024, the American people could make them pay dearly. The post Forget Rs or Ds: This Is What the 2025 Elections Can Tell Us About the Midterms appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Republican senators weighed in this week on calls to end the filibuster following the continued failure by the Senate to open the government. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said, “[H]ere’s the other thing I’d say, if the Democrats aren’t willing to negotiate, and we can’t get anywhere on this, we’re going to think about changing the rules of the Senate, because at the end of the day, we cannot allow the government to remain permanently closed, the military not paid, needy families go hungry, all because we got to get 60 votes and the Democrats won’t give them to us.” Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., in a letter sent this week to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., requested that the Republican leader, “suspend the cloture rule, in order to bring HR 5371 to the Senate floor.” The Louisiana congressman addressed some political apprehension about the move, writing, “Suspending the cloture rule to end this shutdown is not “nuclear”, it’s just smart. If the cloture rule is waived or amended, Republicans can bring the House continuing resolution to the Senate floor, pass it by simple majority, open the government, and by God just win and keep winning.” Other members of Congress have expressed support for maintaining the filibuster during these highly polarized times.  “We are not going to eliminate the filibuster—the votes aren’t there. Without it, we could see efforts to add Puerto Rico and D.C. as states to gain more Democrat seats and potentially pack the Supreme Court to secure a permanent liberal majority. Ending the filibuster would threaten the America we know today,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., told The Daily Signal. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., explained in a recent joint interview with his colleague Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., “The reason the cloture rule and the filibuster rule even exists is it forces people that disagree, just like Americans do, to be able to have a place in government where two sides that disagree have to sit down and be able to work it out. So, I’ve been so adamant to be able to protect the filibuster.”  In a showing of bipartisan support, Coons expressed affirmation with Lankford’s point.  “I agree with what my Republican colleague said, which was, the thing that distinguishes the Senate is that we are still forced to negotiate and to work together,” Coons stated when asked about a statement by Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., where he advocated carving out the filibuster “so we can move on.” “I respect Senator Fetterman, but I think that was more of an off the cuff answer than a measured and thoughtful response about the structural significance of the filibuster,” Coons said.  “It’s a really bad idea, and it would be worse for Republicans than Democrats for sure. If you look at the history of our country, they have had all the power many more times than we have and they would make D.C. a state and have 15 Supreme Court justices,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told Scott Hennen Friday on the radio program “What’s on Your Mind.” The president himself acknowledged the states if Democrats obtained control over the legislative and executive branches in the future and were not constrained by needing 60 votes in the Senate. “[Democrats] want to substantially expand (PACK!) the United States Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico States (Thereby automatically picking up 4 Senate seats, many House seats, and at least 8 Electoral Votes!), and many other highly destructive things,” Trump said in the same post calling for the end of the filibuster. The president contended that the Democrats were prepared to end the filibuster as soon as they obtained the prerequisite electoral wins again. “If the Democrats ever came back into power, which would be made easier for them if the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it,” Trump posted. The post Republican Senators React to Calls to Abolish the Filibuster appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Don Crews traveled more than 500 miles to see the East Coast premiere of the new stage production “Lewis & Tolkien.”  “Absolutely, it was worth it,” Crews said of making the trip from his home in Georgia to Washington, D.C., to watch the production in celebration of his 77th birthday.   For roughly an hour and 45 minutes, the gripping performance offers the audience a window into an intimate, funny, and sometimes contentious conversation between famed British authors Clive Staples Lewis and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. At times, audiences may even feel uncomfortable as if they are eavesdropping on a private conversation. With a set intended to portray The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford Lewis and Tolkien frequented in the 1930s and ’40s, the play pulls on letters and writings from the two men to craft a lively dialogue between the authors, whose friendship grew cold in their later years.  The Eagle and Child public house in Oxford, England, was used as a meeting place by authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. (Amanda Lewis via Getty Images) Lewis and Tolkien were a part of a small group of male writers called the Inklings who gathered weekly to read manuscripts of their works aloud and provide encouragement and critique. The group met consistently for 15 to 20 years.  Though there were other proficient writers among the Inklings, such as Charles Williams, the fame of Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” and Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” has drawn special attention to Lewis’ and Tolkien’s participation in the group—and also their personal friendship.   While the two men shared a close friendship throughout the years of the Inklings meetings, and Tolkien even played a role in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, the men grew apart in the last decade of Lewis’ life.   The play explores some of the reasons Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship fractured, including Tolkien’s dislike of allegory in “The Chronicles of Narnia” and disapproval, as a devout Catholic, of Lewis’ marriage to Joy Davidman, a divorced woman.   It is reported that the two men met once before Lewis died in 1963 at the age of 64, 10 years before Tolkien’s death in 1973, but it isn’t known if they ever reconciled. The play “Lewis & Tolkien,” written by Dean Batali, explores what the men’s final conversation might have entailed if they had freely discussed their differences and offenses, and sought reconciliation.   Actors Bo Foxworth (left) and Arye Gross portray C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively, in the stage play “Lewis & Tolkien.” (Courtesy of “Lewis & Tolkien”) The play is “especially about male friendship, which you don’t see represented in television, or film, or [on] stage that much,” Batali told The Daily Signal following the production.   Batali, who has been working in TV since 1995 and has written for shows, including “That ’70s Show” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” says he drew upon what is known about the character and logic of each man to draft the show’s involved dialogue.   Batali first went to Hollywood because he wanted to “see churchgoing characters, like myself, represented on television.” Within entertainment, it is “hard to find characters utilizing their faith, struggling through, and that’s what I wanted to represent,” he said. Fulfilling that desire, Batali wrote the play in 2022, and it has since been performed in Hollywood; Seattle; Calgary and Alberta, Canada; and now Washington, D.C.   Director Andrew Borba, who has also worked in television and has known Batali since high school, said he and Batali agree that the first rule in entertainment is “don’t bore” the audience. Approaching a nearly two-hour play set in one room with dialogue between three characters, Lewis, Tolkien, and a waitress named Veronica, the director says Batali was careful to follow that rule.   “The writing is really good,” Borba said, adding that the three actors were “specifically chosen for their ability with language.”   Arye Gross, who plays Tolkien; Bo Foxworth, who portrays Lewis; and Anna Theoni DiGiovanni, who plays Veronica, are all well-versed in Shakespeare, giving them, according to the director, an ability to “make things that are challenging more accessible.”   The themes of friendship, forgiveness, community, and faith are woven through the play, but Borba says he especially appreciates that the production showcases two men who have “a deep history and a deep disagreement, and they are willing to stay in the room together.”   Tickets to “Lewis & Tolkien” range from $35 to $59 with performances Thursday through Sunday all through November at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.    The post Friendship and Falling Out of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien  appeared first on The Daily Signal.