“What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.” That was the mordant comment of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, on the failure of a liberal reform to achieve the results promised with great assurance by the articulate liberal eminences of the day. With two centuries of foresight, he might just as well have been describing President Donald Trump’s triumph, celebrated “in a state of ecstasy” in Israel’s Knesset on Monday, as he secured the release of hostages held by Hamas for two years and won support from multiple Muslim nations for his 20-point peace plan between Israel and Hamas. Or as The Free Press’s Matthew Continetti put it, “Trump has done more to advance peace in the Middle East than the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs could hope to achieve in a million years.” Certainly, more than anyone has accomplished since Israel’s victories in the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the era when it became accepted wisdom that Arab and Muslim nations would recognize Israel’s legitimacy only after it reached some form of agreement with Palestinian leaders on the creation of a Palestinian state. The conventional wisdom was that pressure must always be exerted on Israel, the leaders and voters of which had obvious qualms about relinquishing any supervision over armed and hostile neighbors within shooting range of their geographically tiny country. The 1990s saw a test of that conventional wisdom, with Israel accepting the Oslo framework, and Bill Clinton, in his final days as president, using his very considerable skills to get Israel to agree to a generous settlement, only to have it shot down at the last minute by Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat. The Second Intifada that followed, and the Hamas terrorists’ takeover of Gaza after Israel relinquished it in 2005, ended any significant support for a “two-state” agreement by Israeli voters. But peddlers of the conventional wisdom ignored Israelis’ characteristic bluntness and persisted in taking seriously Arab states’ ritualistic affirmations of support for a Palestinian state. Trump chose a different path. Rather than pressuring Israel to make concessions or pleading with the Palestinians to accept them, he pursued, and secured, direct agreements between Israel and other Arab nations. During his first term, his team, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, forged the Abraham Accords by capitalizing on the Gulf states’ ambitions for economic growth and regional stability. Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and withdrew from former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. In his second term, unlike former President Joe Biden, who repeatedly sought to restrain Israel’s response to Hamas, Trump backed Israel’s military offensives and followed through on his 12-day war that crippled Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow. Pressure on Hamas’ hosts in Qatar, home to a major U.S. air base, escalated after Israel launched missiles on Sept. 9 to assassinate Hamas leaders there. Trump publicly disapproved of the strike and, during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s White House visit on Sept. 29, even urged him to call Qatar’s ruler and apologize. Whether it was genuine remorse or a maneuver straight out of Michael Corleone’s playbook, the gesture appears to have worked. The Qataris soon pressed Hamas to accept the first stage of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, the release of all surviving Israeli hostages, after Trump reaffirmed, in the Knesset and afterward, that he would fully back Israeli retaliation should Hamas break the deal. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren wrote that Trump “knows the language of strength.” He seems to appreciate and admire Israel’s strength and is willing to capitalize on the weakness of the country’s enemy, Hamas, and the terrorist group’s enabler, Qatar. Here, I think, is something that separates Trump from the conventional wisdom and, by a wider margin, from those here and abroad who have been demonstrating in favor of Hamas and the Palestinians. Those who called for a ceasefire for two years are conspicuously not joining in the celebrations for the ceasefire now in place. The demonstrators and the purveyors of the two-state solution tend to side with what they consider the oppressed over those they consider the oppressors. They consider any skepticism about the moral worth of the weaker party as “punching down.” The demonstrators chant that Israel is committing genocide. The conventional wisdom says Israel, with all its advantages, must make concessions. Trump, and the large majority of Americans over 30 who have favored Israel over the Palestinians for many years, admire self-sufficiency, competence, inventiveness and success. The U.S. and Israel have their faults. But overall and from a historical perspective, they have been glorious successes. An example, in the spotlight this week, is the American Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr, recipient of the Nobel economics prize. His writings, which I can claim only to have sampled, argue that mankind’s sudden rise above subsistence economies was the product not just of technological advances but also of habits of mind that have produced self-sufficiency, competence and creativity. Which you can argue were characteristics of the diplomacy that experienced observers dismissed as amateurish and slapdash, and whose further course remains uncertain. In any case, its success so far has transformed Trump’s lust for his own Nobel Prize from the comic to the conceivable. 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 Trump Defies Conventional Wisdom … So Far appeared first on The Daily Signal.

You may have heard the expression “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This expression speaks loudly when the issue of “renewable” energy comes up. >>> Sign up for our Virginia email newsletter The Daily Signal sat down with Andy Anderson, a businessman who has been called to testify before the Virginia State Corporation Commission on energy costs, who shows us what he uncovered in the “statistics” used to sell people on the Virginia Clean Economy Act and its reliance on solar energy. Listen here: The post Hidden Costs of Solar: Exposing the Flaws in Virginia’s Clean Economy Act appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Bernie Gets Schooled On...The View

Dems: How About a No Hakeems Day?

Not often you get to see something like this moving.

Turtles do it, baby dragonflies do it, so why shouldn’t people with clogged lungs survive by breathing through their posteriors?

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr joins the NewsBusters Podcast to discuss protecting free speech over the airwaves and online, the future of broadcast licenses, and Operation Clean Carts—his push to block fraudulent Chinese hardware from infiltrating U.S. networks. David Bozell asks about the FCC's "public interest" standard for broadcast TV affiliates.  At a time when the latest Gallup poll showed an all-time low in trust in the media -- only 28 percent have at least "a fair amount" of trust, while 70 percent said little or no trust -- is it time for a more energetic FCC to question if all this broadcast bias is in the public interest? Carr told Bozell the poll shows "More Americans have trust in gas station sushi than they do in legacy mainstream media. And it’s a problem of the media’s own making." CARR: The legacy mainstream media missed some of the most important stories of the last five or ten years. Hunter Biden laptop story, gone. Covid origins, total miss. Whips at the border – remember that story? There were all these stories about emergency rooms in the Midwest being shut down from Ivermectin overdoses. It ended up being complete hoaxes, not true. Covington Catholic [Nicholas Sandmann], you go down the line. Jussie Smollett. Major, major important stories. The reason why this news media should exist, and they’re 180 [degrees] wrong on it. So I think it’s a massive indictment on themselves. While President Trump has talked about pulling licenses for broadcast TV stations, it's a complicated process with hearings. It hasn't been done in decades -- although Carr pointed out that the Left wanted to start that process for broadcast stations owned by Sinclair, charging that they had a right-wing bias. In 2023, leftists pushed a petition seeking to revoke the broadcast license of the Fox-owned affiliate in Philadelphia over its parent company's "promotion of falsehoods about fraud in the 2020 election." The FCC denied it last year. Watch the podcast below, or on YouTube or Rumble. The audio is here.   

The trend of the late night hosts devolving from comedians into DNC talking heads continued on Monday as they gushed over the weekend’s No Kings protestors. According to them, the size of the crowds should discredit the idea they were actually quite radical. On The Late Show, CBS’s Stephen Colbert excitedly wondered, “Do you feel that? Do you feel the vibe? It's electric in here. You can feel the energy in this room because these folks are still high from the No Kings rally this weekend. That was beautiful! It’s a beautiful sight to see. On Saturday, 7 million people turned out in over 2,700 events in all 50 states.”      Colbert also tried painting the protests as mainstream, “Of course the far-left loons were all out 'n proud in the bastions of liberal anarchy: Lee's Summit, Missouri. Sarasota, Florida. Plano, Texas. Mount Vernon, Iowa, Leesburg, Virginia. And Idaho Pocatello, Idaho. Even the people in Idaho turned out to tell Trump ‘No, you da ho.’” Fact-check: Lee’s Summit, Mount Vernon, and Leesburg are all in blue counties, while Pocatello is a college town. Meanwhile, Late Night host Seth Meyers also used his NBC show to promote crowd sizes, “By the way, I can’t help but compare the size of the No Kings rallies to the size of the right-wing Tea Party protests back in 2009, which were much smaller but commanded an obsessive amount of media attention.” After a montage of news clips from 2009 and 2010, Meyers continued, “Several hundred thousand Tea Party protesters compared to 7 million at No Kings rallies… It's worth keeping the comparison between the two rallies in mind just to put in perspective how unprecedented these anti-Trump protests have been. So, naturally, Trump has responded by choosing to lie about them.”     On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Monday host Jon Stewart tried to suggest that GOP claims the rallies would be full of radicals were nonsense, “What the? Not the hardest core! I expected partial Marxism and hardcore, but not full display hardest-core ha-Marxism!…And so this weekend, we sat in our bunkers, doors locked, windows boarded, muskets and cyanide pills at the ready, prepared for whatever the hardest core had in store. Do your worst, display your max—Marxism to its fullest!” It is a fact that the Communist Party USA was a co-sponsor of the New York City rally. Still, after a clip of protestors singing “This Land Is Your Land,” Stewart sarcastically mourned, “No! Not public domain folk classics, you monsters! Actually, it was kind of an incredible turnout that was somewhat inspiring.” He further added, “Seven million Americans, zero mass shootings. Zero. That's just sad. No mass shootings? My god. Has that happened before? Even the dog parade had some nipping. It wasn't a hate America rally at all! I look forward to Republicans apologizing sincerely for implying that these Americans were what's the word I'm looking for? Deplorable.” Later, Stewart welcomed Sen. Bernie Sanders to the show and asked him, “First of all, thank you for being here. How were these No Kings rallies? You went, you addressed one. Where did you speak?” Sanders answered that he was in D.C. and hyped, “There were some 7 million people out and 2,600 events all over the country, not only in big cities, but in small towns. Bottom line: extraordinary. People came out and said no to Trumpism, no to authoritarianism, no to oligarchy.”     One of the other speakers at the D.C. rally was a Hamas apologist, but Stewart wasn’t interested in that. Instead, he heaped more praise on his guest, “And it grew from the previous expression of those, and obviously, you can go back and say, ‘Well, you know, maybe the left is building a similar thing to the Tea Party.’ With all of this potential energy that is moving in that direction, how do you harness that for purpose, for being directional? There are not a lot of people out there other than yourself, other than Representative Cortez, who are very clearly delineated about a point of view that people can rally behind.” Sanders freaked out that, “We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time, as you know. You have an authoritarian president who wants more and more power, doesn't respect the Constitution, doesn’t respect the law… You've got a Republican Party that is in lockstep, kind of a cult of the individual. We've got to stop him.” If a Tea Party rally had one distasteful sign, liberals would use that to smear the entire movement, but nobody in the media, comedians included, cares that a rally in New York was sponsored by the CPUSA or that the one in D.C. had a Hamas-supporting speaker.  Here are transcripts for the October 20-taped show: CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 10/20/2025 11:37 PM ET STEPHEN COLBERT: Do you feel that? Do you feel the vibe? It's electric in here. You can feel the energy in this room because these folks are still high from the No Kings rally this weekend. That was beautiful! It’s a beautiful sight to see. On Saturday, 7 million people turned out in over 2,700 events in all 50 states. There were absolutely massive crowds in Chicago, Illinois, in Los Angeles, in Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and right here in New York, New York.  You know, we know -- you know New Yorkers are pissed when they voluntarily come to Times Square on a weekend. Rub elbows with the Elmos. Of course the far-left loons were all out 'n proud in the bastions of liberal anarchy: Lee's Summit, Missouri. Sarasota, Florida. Plano, Texas. Mount Vernon, Iowa, Leesburg, Virginia. And Idaho Pocatello, Idaho. Even the people in Idaho turned out to tell Trump "No, you da ho."  Thank you, thank you, thank you. Peabody, please.  *** NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers 10/20/2025 12:47 AM ET SETH MEYERS: By the way, I can’t help but compare the size of the No Kings rallies to the size of the right-wing Tea Party protests back in 2009, which were much smaller but commanded an obsessive amount of media attention. LOCAL NEWS REPORTER [9/12/09]: New at 6:00, protesting the president, taxes, and health care reform. The TEA Party, which stands for "Taxed enough already" has been traveling across the country calling for smaller government and reduced taxes. REPORTER [7/4/09]: Thousands of activists held rallies in cities across the country, protesting big government and big government spending. Similar so-called Tea Parties sprang up around the country last April to blast the economic stimulus package, a movement championed by high-profile conservatives. REPORTER 2 [1/27/10]: Best guess was that several hundred thousand participated in one or more of the protests last year. MEYERS: Several hundred thousand Tea Party protesters compared to 7 million at No Kings rallies. And worst of all, they didn't even have a naked bike ride. The closest they got was one guy in a tricorn hat and a speedo. Also, tricorn hats and speedos weren't around at the same time. Sorry to be an ass[bleep] about it, but I can't stand historical anachronisms. It's worth keeping the comparison between the two rallies in mind just to put in perspective how unprecedented these anti-Trump protests have been. So, naturally, Trump has responded by choosing to lie about them. *** Comedy Central The Daily Show 10/20/2025 11:02 PM ET JON STEWART: What the? Not the hardest core! I expected partial Marxism and hardcore, but not full display hardest core ha-Marxism! It was going to be like Mad Max out there with Chuck Schumer on flaming guitar! That’s a real photograph. And so this weekend, we sat in our bunkers, doors locked, windows boarded, muskets and cyanide pills at the ready, prepared for whatever the hardest-core had in store. Do your worst, display your max—Marxism to its fullest! ANDREW DYMBURT: An estimated 7 million people gathered across some 2,700 no kings rallies and cities from coast to coast and what is being described as the largest single day demonstration in U.S. history. ROSEMARY CHURCH: Not only were they largely peaceful, they were often joyful. PROTESTORS: This land is my land, from California to the New York Island. STEWART: No! Not public domain folk classics, you monsters! Actually, it was kind of an incredible turnout that was somewhat inspiring. Seven million Americans, zero mass shootings. Zero. That's just sad. No mass shootings? My god. Has that happened before? Even the dog parade had some nipping. It wasn't a hate America rally at all! I look forward to Republicans apologizing sincerely for implying that these Americans were what's the word I'm looking for? Deplorable. … STEWART: First of all, thank you for being here. How were these No Kings rallies? You went, you addressed one. Where did you speak? BERNIE SANDERS: I was in D.C. There was some 200,000 people out in D.C. There were some 7 million people out and 2,600 events all over the country, not only in big cities, but in small towns. Bottom line: extraordinary. People came out and said no to Trumpism, no to authoritarianism, no to oligarchy. STEWART: And it grew from the previous expression of those, and obviously, you can go back and say, “Well, you know, maybe the left is building a similar thing to the Tea Party.” With all of this potential energy that is moving in that direction, how do you harness that for purpose, for being directional? There are not a lot of people out there other than yourself, other than Representative Cortez, who are very clearly delineated about a point of view that people can rally behind. SANDERS: Well, let me just say two things. We are in an extraordinarily dangerous time, as you know. You have an authoritarian president who wants more and more power, doesn't respect the Constitution, doesn’t respect the law. STEWART: Well, a Supreme Court that’s granting it to him. SANDERS: Right. That’s true. I mean, that’s part of the process. You've got a Republican Party that is in lockstep, kind of a cult of the individual. We've got to stop him. 

On Tuesday, October 14, the cast of ABC’s The View whined on-air that Republicans didn’t want to come on the program to talk with them. According to co-host Joy Behar, Republicans were “afraid of us.” But after a clip of Behar’s suggestion went viral, Republicans and conservatives began to call out The View for repeatedly turning down their requests to appear on the show. “I was going to say that I think we should have more Republicans on the show, but they don’t want to come on. They're scared of us. It’s like Marjorie Taylor Greene says that she finds the Republican men afraid of powerful women,” Behar declared.     But it seemed as though The View was afraid of having a strong conservative woman on the show. “When I was pitched to go on, they said no lol,” quipped Riley Gaines on X. Gaines, an advocate for protecting women’s sports from transgendered males pretending to be women, would be a great counterbalance since The View advocates for men in women’s sports.     Danielle Alverez, senior advisor for the Republican National Committee, sounded a “Fake News Alert” on behalf of Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds (R-FL), in her own X post. “@ByronDonalds has offered to join @TheView but the show has declined,” she wrote. “@JoyVBehar should have checked with her team before making the ridiculous claim ‘[Republicans] are scared of us.’” Adding: “Offer still stands! Will you accept?” Donalds himself also reaffirmed his offer: “Hey @TheView, my offer still stands. I’m ready when you are!”     Clay Travis, syndicated radio host and the founder of OutKick, shared a screenshot of his team’s e-mail request to the show’s producers, which read: Conservative radio hosts Clay and Buck would like to pitch themselves as guests on The View. They often play clips from the program on their nationally syndicated radio show (granted, as a means to refute them) and thought a sit-down would be productive for both audiences since they come from two completely different perspectives. “Hey @JoyVBehar here is our producer Ali emailing The View last July offering for us to come on as guests. We’re big fans. Look forward to the invite!” Travis wrote on X.     Joel Pollak, the editor-at-large for Breitbart News, said on X that it was like pulling teeth to get invited in 2017 with the producers really having to work to convince the liberal hosts to allow him on. And they refused his subsequent requests: This is a lie by @JoyVBehar. When I was invited onto @TheView in 2017, producers told me they had to work hard to convince the show to invite a conservative. The appearance went well, and I reached out several times for a return visit. They declined. They are afraid of dialogue.     In 2023, NewsBusters exclusively reported that The View rejected Senator Cruz’s request to appear on the show as part of his tour to promote his book at the time. Cruz’s team reached out to the producers three times and were denied every time. According to a response e-mail, they were “not able to make an offer at this time, but will definitely be in touch if anything changes.” Even NewsBusters had made public overtures for our editors and analysts to go on the show and have a little chat with the liberal ladies about their liberally biased content. Many of us here would leap at the opportunity. Maybe even one of them could appear on the NewsBusters Podcast. The Media Research Center and NewsBusters even sent a formal request to The View's producers on Monday October 20; offering up our President David Bozell and a few of our editors, including this author, as possible guests. As of the posting of this piece, we have not heard back from them. We'll update this piece if we hear back from them. It’s not like The View was unfamiliar with NewsBusters. They kvetched about a study we put out counting their legal notes. The View has since stopped issuing legal notes. In April 2024, The View’s executive producer, Brian Teta told Deadline that they had stopped asking President Trump to appear on the show and that “we’re not going to put people on there to [spread] misinformation.” A laughable concept given the current nature of the show. And despite multiple conservative organizations calling The View's bluff and flooding them with requests to appear on the show, the show's ticket request page 1iota doesn't show any conservative guests as of Monday (see below).

The story that modernity tells itself is one of technological progress. We have told this story for so long, with such unwavering conviction, that we have forgotten it has an author. When the Nobel committee awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics to Joel Mokyr, they were not merely recognizing a historian. They were footnoting the author of our prevailing narrative, a 17th-century English statesman who never invented a single device, but who successfully marketed ideas so potent that they would remake the world in their image. The story of our prosperity, Mokyr insists, begins with Francis Bacon.It begins, more precisely, with a frontispiece. The engraving on Bacon’s 1620 "Novum Organum" depicts a ship sailing past the Pillars of Hercules, venturing out from the known world into an uncharted ocean. The motto beneath, “Many will travel and knowledge will be increased,” was not only a prediction but an exhortation. Before Bacon, knowledge was largely a matter of contemplation and study of classical authorities. He saw these as dead ends. Knowledge, he declared, ought to bear fruit in production. Its purpose was not merely to understand the world but to gain “dominion over creation” for the “relief of man’s estate.” Ipsa scientia potestas est. Knowledge itself is power.This created the feedback loop that defines modernity: Scientific theory leads to new technology, and new technical problems spur further scientific inquiry.This was the core of what Mokyr calls the “Baconian program”: a philosophical revolution that reframed humanity’s relationship with nature. Nature was no longer a given order to be accepted, but a set of secrets to be extracted, a force to be subdued. Bacon spoke of putting nature “on the rack” to force her to confess her laws. The goal was utility. The method was to marry the rational and the empirical, to unite the philosopher in his study with the craftsman in his workshop. In "The New Atlantis," he imagined a research institute called “Salomon’s House,” dedicated to inventing things. He was, in Mokyr’s description, a “cultural entrepreneur,” and the product he was selling was a particular vision of the future.This product sold remarkably well. From the mid-17th through the 18th century, the Baconian program became the organizing principle of the European intellectual elite. The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, adopted Bacon as its patron. Its members were not to take anyone’s word for the truth; they were to experiment and measure instead. Across the continent, a network of thinkers in the “Republic of Letters” spread the gospel of useful knowledge through correspondence and journals. The monumental French "Encyclopédie" was a direct descendant, an audacious attempt to catalog and disseminate all practical human knowledge, from mining techniques to political theory. The very idea that sharing knowledge leads to progress became an article of faith. This was the “Industrial Enlightenment,” a culture that not only hoped for improvement but actively engineered it.RELATED: God made man in His image — will 'faith tech' flip the script? Photo by NurPhoto/Getty ImagesThe Industrial Revolution, in Mokyr’s telling, was not an accident of capital or coal. It was an intellectual achievement, the consequence of this cultural rewiring. James Watt did not improve the steam engine in a vacuum. He was a product of a new culture, a skilled mechanic familiar with the latest scientific theories on heat and pressure. His separate condenser was not a feat of solitary genius, but a manifestation of Bacon’s call to unite “know-why” with “know-how.” This created the feedback loop that defines modernity: Scientific theory leads to new technology, and new technical problems spur further scientific inquiry. The economic growth that followed was not just an increase; it was a phase change. It became sustained and exponential because of the cultural engine continuously driving it.America inherited this engine and supercharged it. Benjamin Franklin was the archetypal home-grown Baconian, an inventor and scientist celebrated for his practical ingenuity. The nation’s founding ethos was steeped in the promise of both geographical and scientific frontiers. The 20th century saw the program institutionalized on a massive scale. Vannevar Bush, persuading the government to fund basic research after World War II, called science “the endless frontier,” an echo of Bacon’s ship sailing into the unknown. The Manhattan Project, the moon landing, the invention of the microchip — these were all expensive, elaborate vindications of a 400-year-old premise. The smartphone in your pocket is a Salomon’s House in miniature, a device built on centuries of accumulated knowledge, from quantum mechanics to materials science, all marshaled for the purpose of utility.And yet one is left to wonder about the price of this story. The Baconian program gave us the power to relieve our estate, but it did so by teaching us to view nature as a resource to be exploited, a standing reserve for our own declared needs. The instrumentalism that gave us vaccines and the internet also gave us a world where we have become alienated from the very ground on which we stand. Bacon’s faith in progress was infectious, but it sidelined other ways of being, other stories that valued contentment over control, harmony over dominion. Mokyr’s great contribution is to show us that the modern economy is not a force of nature, but the result of a choice made long ago. He reminds us that the contemporary world we inhabit was first imagined. We live inside a 17th-century dream.