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Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) says he can’t support the “Big, Beautiful Bill” as reported out of the House. His criticism is on point – soaring federal debt. Unfortunately, and it pains me to say this of such a consistently commendable senator, Paul’s command of the big picture suffers for his flawed finer points. First, Paul […]

Rob McGreevy breaks it down on Media Madness

'A danger to America'

'Many significant wins for the American people'

'They put us on a small houseboat and took us over the lake to a little villa'

“No Kings” protests of various sizes broke in mostly blue cities on Saturday. The defining feature of these rather tame demonstrations—that appeared to be mostly octogenarian boomers who just finished their shopping trip at Whole Foods—was that there was, well, no defining feature other than that they don’t like the duly elected President Donald Trump. FALLS CHURCH, VA— pic.twitter.com/ulFaTYHcO0— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) June 14, 2025 As one X user pointed out, the messages being sent at the protests were all over the map. It was more a “progressive grievance buffet” than a focused protest. Check out the signs. Gaza, Immigration, Gay flags… it’s all over the place. Just a progressive grievance buffet. https://t.co/fn6crBYBR1— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) June 15, 2025 If you didn’t see any of the protests, this screed by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, captured the overall feel. Here's Randi Weingarten leading a "No Kings" rally today.Abolish teachers unions. pic.twitter.com/VFsV59WSpm— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) June 14, 2025 The name of the movement may be “No Kings,” but monarchy didn’t really seem to be their chief concern. Several of the demonstrations had to be renamed because they took place in Canada and in other countries where they technically have a king. Canadians are joining the No Kings protest, but they had to rename it because Canada has a king. pic.twitter.com/Xb9h4mAyvI— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) June 14, 2025 Monarchy and even arbitrary rule clearly weren’t their primary issues. Just a few months ago, the same type of people allegedly mad about kings were only too happy to celebrate King Charles’ visit to Canada. He didn’t disappoint. The king began his speech in Canada’s parliament with a “land acknowledgment” to satisfy his subjects’ desire to recognize that while the entire history of their nation is illegitimate, they don’t actually have to do anything about it other than feel good about the self-flagellation. For the American protesters I find it hard to believe they just really hate royal symbolism. After all, at one point in our country’s distant past—when most of this weekend’s protests were young and “anti-establishment”—there was all kinds of media praise for “Camelot,” the Kennedy political dynasty. I’m guessing many of these protesters cast a vote for a Kennedy or two. The anti-monarchy or even executive power message just doesn’t make sense. They didn’t care when President Barack Obama, the “pen and phone” president, was tearing up immigration laws to enact amnesty by executive fiat. What was that about “no kings”? https://t.co/JafQv9uWFP— Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) June 16, 2025 When former President Joe Biden was acting like a typical king of old, spending his days taking naps and eating ice cream while his advisers did authoritarian things like randomly declare new constitutional amendments official on social media, they were nowhere to be found. When Vice President Kamala Harris was simply made the Democrat presidential nominee without any primary or decision by voters it seemed more like a coronation than democracy. Again, we didn’t see a “No Kings” protest then. Only now that Democrats are out of power, that unaccountable institutions are being held to account, are they taking to the streets. And that’s what I think is the deeper message of these protests, though I am really stretching the word “deep” here. The supporters of the old institutional order are raging at their sudden impotence in the face of a political counterrevolution. They are enraged by the unraveling of that old order that insisted we “believe in science,” while science institutions embraced ideology over truth. They were for COVID-19 lockdowns when it was clear they were actually hurting children and destroying lives. They embraced the Great Awokening that aimed at casting all American history, including that whole “no kings” 1776 thing into the fire. Their flag is not the American flag of the republic, not really. It’s the transgender, “woke” flag of intersectionality. We have no Kings and no subjects in the United States of America. pic.twitter.com/rJsAnXIZTM— Jamie Raskin (@jamie_raskin) June 14, 2025 They are the dwindling demographic that still listens to legacy media and insists they are fair and objective as most Americans tune out. What they are actually for is the unelected bureaucracy that has over time crowded out and has been slowly supplanting our federal republic. They are an alternate universe version of the Tea Party movement that exploded in 2009. Only this movement isn’t protesting on behalf of the Constitution or any issue in particular. They are protesting in favor of the progressive constitutional order represented by our corrupted institutions. They are desperate for the country to embrace the litany of deeply unpopular issues fully embraced by the elite institutional regime but largely loathed by most Americans. This was an aging, middle-class white liberal primal scream. America doesn’t have a king, so mission accomplished. It also doesn’t need to be controlled by unaccountable, deep state bureaucrats who think they have a right to rule and not the American people. The post The Left’s ‘No Kings’ Protests Were All About Sanctimony appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’d like to comment on this strange, bizarre, surreal, sudden fallout—or was it so sudden—between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump. All of a sudden, Elon Musk started to attack the “big, beautiful bill” that’s now in the Senate because he said it spent too much money and it was contrary to all the work that he had done with his Department of Government Efficiency team. They were cutting spending. And yet, this was too generous, I suppose. It may increase the deficit, if the economy is not stimulated, as the bill intends. But the point is that Donald Trump then said he was kind of bizarre, that he has a very thin margin in Congress and he was kind of surprised that his friend and ally would attack him that way. And then that started a cascade. So, in the next 48 hours, we heard from Elon Musk that Donald Trump owed his victory to his efforts in Pennsylvania. He won the Electoral College, remember, beyond Pennsylvania. It was critical. But it was not sine qua non. He could have won without Pennsylvania, given the Electoral College margin. And then he said, in addition, that Donald Trump might look at impeachment. That’s a little scary because if the Democrats win the midterms, that’s the first thing they’re going to do. So, that was kind of eerie. He also mentioned the Epstein files. He said he was going to disconnect his SpaceX Dragon component from the national space effort. I don’t think he’s going to do that. That would be nihilistic. And then Donald Trump replied that in kind but not nearly as intense as Elon Musk. So, what was it all about? People have given all sorts of different explanations. One of them is that the new big, beautiful bill will phase out subsidies for all electric vehicles. And given Tesla’s attacks on—people attacking stations, chargers, dealers, individual drivers, the bad publicity the Democrats ginned up, he can’t afford that right now. He was very upset. Maybe it was his nominee, he thought, to head NASA that the Trump people felt was—correctly—that was a Democrat and too far left. And then there were Cabinet secretaries that said that Elon Musk was not just advising them where to cut but sort of demanding. So, there was always a tense relationship that grew out of an unnatural relationship, in the sense that rarely—we haven’t seen anything like this since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, who was a personal adviser to FDR. Unlike Musk, he moved into the White House and basically crafted the whole detente with Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, as a leftist himself. So, it was a relationship that was very, very close in an unusual way and it was bound to have these tensions. Then Musk said, you know, he started making these threats. But he can’t go anywhere because, remember, the California Coastal Commission, left-wing Coastal Commission, tried to stop additional rocket flights. The Left demonize him. They hate him for what he did with DOGE. He’s under assault on Tesla. His whole philosophy is entrepreneurism, lower taxes, less deregulation—not what the Left has. So, he’s frustrated because he knows he can’t go back to the Left. And yet, he’s angry about this bill. And then, when Trump sort of brushed it off, he went DEFCON 1. Is there a hope to this relationship being healed? I think there is because it was historically rare to have a private citizen so close with the administration. But if you take that away, you can see they have the same enemies—the Left are delighted right now and they’re fueling this. They have the same enemies and they have the same friends. They’re not perpendicular, they’re parallel. They have the same eventual visions of what America should be. They want less government, less deregulation, fewer taxes, a cultural counterrevolution, unleashing of entrepreneurial talent, a meritocracy, instead of DEI, closed border, legal-only immigration. So, they’re almost synonymous. So, what happens to heal this rift? I think we all know what has to happen. Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world. But unlike Elon Musk, he doesn’t run a private company or even a public-held company by fiat. Even though he has majorities in the House and Senate, he has to compromise. It’s like herding cats. He can’t get the bill he wants or his advisers want. So, this beautiful bill has elements on border security, on defense that are good. And it’s the beginning, not the end. So, Musk needs to see that, as a CEO, he can rule by directive. He can rule by fiat. And in some ways, he has more power over his domain than Donald Trump—or any president does—over his. So, he has got to appreciate that. The other thing that he has to appreciate, I think, is that Donald Trump is now in negotiations with three of the meanest SOBs in the world: Xi Jinping, the head of China; Vladimir Putin; and whoever the lunatic theocrats are running things in Iran. He can’t afford to back down in a private dispute with an individual American, even one that’s the richest man in the world, because it would send a message to these three characters that if you press Donald Trump, you get him angry or you do something, he will back off. And the Left has been already using that mim. So, what needs to happen is intermediaries come forward and they spell out the new relationship. It will not be as intense. It will not be as close. It will not be as frequent. And therefore, it will avoid these disruptions. But it will be based on mutual admiration, respect. But more importantly, Elon Musk needs Donald Trump for the space exploration, for a fair shake on his business deals. And Donald Trump is aided by Elon Musk, especially the SpaceX. So, it’s a mutually beneficiary relationship, not just for both of them, but for us, the American people. And make no mistake about it, the Democratic Party may be neutered, but it is not inert. It is waging potty-mouth videos, congressional disruptions, attacks on Teslas, huge donor-supplied lawfare going after the Trump agenda in these lower district courts. It is all geared up and frenzied for the midterms. Now is the time for unity, not disunity. And the quicker these two very talented and powerful people can form a new relationship based not as intensely as the past but on mutual respect, the better it is for the country at large. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Trump-Musk Split Is a Gift to the Left appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Make shipping affordable again is the idea behind new legislation introduced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. The Open America’s Waters Act, introduced Thursday, would repeal the Jones Act, aimed at deregulating the U.S.’s coastal trade and helping mitigate America’s energy crisis. The legislation would specifically repeal the regulations that require vessels that carry U.S. goods by water between U.S. ports to be constructed in the U.S., registered in the U.S., owned by U.S. citizens, and primarily crewed by Americans. Companion legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif. “When antiquated red tape goes uncut, American businesses and families pay the price,” Lee told The Daily Signal. “The Jones Act is a perfect example. A regulation that’s over a century old is forcing American producers to import oil from Russia, putting our energy independence at risk and increasing costs for consumers,” the Utah senator explained.  “A law that incentivizes American businesses to rely on a foreign nation for energy resources is a bad law. The Open America’s Waters Act will repeal this regulatory burden to bring prices down for Americans, protect our national security, and secure American energy dominance,” Lee said. In a press release announcing the introduction of the legislation, the Utah senator’s office makes the argument that the Jones Act has actually had the opposite effect of its intent, which was to protect Americans, by restricting Americans’ access to critical energy resources and forcing American companies to rely on adversarial nations for those resources. “For example, cattle ranchers in Hawaii have opted for expensive planes rather than boats to transport cattle to the mainland. Puerto Rico imports jet fuel from Venezuela—benefiting the human rights-violating Maduro regime—rather than nearby Gulf Coast refineries,” the press statement noted.  Moreover, because of the burdensome regulations, the Jones Act increases costs for American consumers. For example, shipping goods to Puerto Rico from U.S. ports costs 150% more than shipping them to the U.S. territory in the Caribbean from some foreign ports. Defenders of the Jones Act say that it protects American jobs related to the maritime-transportation sector. According to American Maritime Voices, a group that was created in partnership with a domestic maritime industry lobbying group, the act supports about 650,000 American jobs with $150 billion in annual economic impact. The group also claims that five indirect jobs are created for every direct maritime job, leading to more than $41 billion in labor compensation.  But opponents of the act say that the job numbers do not tell the full story about the Jones Act’s impact on domestic shipbuilding. The number of oceangoing ships made in the U.S. per year has declined during much of the time the act has been in place, from 45 ships in 1953 to just five ships in 2015. Some supporters of the act also contend that the law boosts U.S. national security by preventing reliance on ships and personnel that ultimately owe their allegiance to foreign powers. However, the Jones Act’s hindrance of national security becomes particularly apparent during crises, sometimes leading to it being waived. After a cyberattack damaged the strategically important Colonial Pipeline in 2021, the Biden administration granted a temporary waiver to allow a company to transport oil products unhindered by Jones Act regulations. The cyberattack had caused gas prices to spike and gas stations in states as far-flung as Georgia and Virginia to experience fuel shortages. The Biden administration granted a second waiver of the Jones Act for a ship carrying diesel fuel after Hurricane Fiona devastated Puerto Rico in 2022.  “Repealing this restrictive and counterproductive law is vital for the new golden age that President Trump has envisioned,” McClintock said in a statement. The post Lee Introduces Bill to Repeal 105-Year-Old Law, Aiming to Lower Shipping Costs appeared first on The Daily Signal.