Trump Unleashed His Day One Energy Blitz — Now What?

'It was fantastic'

'A reflection of voters rejecting open borders in November'

He leaves behind a legacy of groundbreaking films

A Last Man Standing battle between Boba Fett and Deadpool, Michael Turner does a Fathom movie Casting Call, Top 10 Worst Comic Merchandise list, a review of ShockRockets from Gorilla Comics and more. Enjoy it, CONTINUE READING... The post WIZARDS The Podcast Guide To Comics | Mini-Episode 102.5 appeared first on The Retro Network.

President Donald Trump has kept his campaign promise to protect American national sovereignty from encroaching global governance bodies by ordering the U.S. to withdraw from the World Health Organization. An executive order titled “Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization” says the United States will leave WHO due to its “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”—presumably China, which sponsored the selection of WHO General-Secretary Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus. The exit order, which will take effect one year after notification, came amidst a flurry of executive orders the president signed within hours of taking the oath of office. “The Trump administration’s announcement that it will withdraw from the WHO is a welcome step toward a healthy ‘reset’ of current global power dynamics,” Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand exclusively. “The WHO and other U.N. bodies had become swollen with power and gone off-course, steamrolling national sovereignty through bureaucratic and hidden decision-making.” The World Health Organization has increasingly stated its support for abortion-on-demand and extreme gender ideology. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO has included “comprehensive abortion care” in the list of “essential health services,” stated WHO’s March 2022 “abortion care guideline.” WHO also added the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol on its “List of Essential Medicines.” Last June, WHO established “official relations” with the radical abortion and transgender lobbyists at the Center for Reproductive Rights. The World Health Organization’s overreach came to the fore with its attempts to negotiate a WHO Pandemic Agreement. The controversial pact would limit national sovereignty, transfer 20% of all U.S. vaccines and medications to WHO, follow a “One Health” philosophy equating human well-being with animal and plant life, and empower social media companies to crack down on purported “misinformation.” Experts branded the pact counterproductive to public health, stating it only served to enhance WHO’s authority over sovereign nation-states. Family Research Council has warned the terms of the WHO Pandemic Agreement create global mechanisms that could one day “function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’” After scrutinizing the text, a congressional report on COVID-19 concluded, “The World Health Organization’s Draft ‘Pandemic Treaty’ Does Not Solve the Organization’s Underlying Problems and May Affirmatively Harm the United States.”  After negotiations deadlocked, WHO officials announced last November that the global governance body would not finalize the text of the sovereignty-stripping accord during the Biden administration, as anticipated. Under the terms of Trump’s executive order, the U.S. will play no role in its future. The EO states that “the Secretary of State will cease negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the amendments to the International Health Regulations, and actions taken to effectuate such agreement and amendments will have no binding force on the United States.” In May, WHO amended its International Health Regulations for the first time in 19 years to label “misinformation and disinformation” as “public health risks,” which nations must fight as one of their “core capacities.” Then-candidate Trump promised to exit the WHO Pandemic Agreement last May, stating, “I will rip them up and throw them out on Day One of the Trump administration.” Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said the agreement should be “dead in the water.” In his first term, Trump announced his intention to depart WHO in July 2020, but President Joe Biden rescinded his notification on his first day in office. Trump, in turn, erased Biden’s reversal on his first day in office. An American departure would blow a large hole in WHO’s finances. U.S. taxpayers are the largest single donor to the World Health Organization, giving WHO $1.28 billion over two years in 2022-2023. “The U.S. is a massive funder of the WHO. Their own livelihood is on the line,” Weber told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice on Tuesday. Yet the World Health Organization responded to the news by saying, while it “regrets” America’s decision to leave and hopes “the United States will reconsider,” WHO will change nothing in its ever-expanding reach for global power. “WHO has over the past 7 years implemented the largest set of reforms in its history” to maximize its “impact in countries. This work continues.” The statement also seemingly claimed a share of credit for U.S.-led improvements in global health. “For over seven decades, WHO and the USA have saved countless lives and protected Americans and all people from health threats. Together, we ended smallpox, and together we have brought polio to the brink of eradication. American institutions have contributed to and benefited from membership in WHO,” the organization asserts. The executive order paves the way for a global health reset that respects national self-determination while paring back the left-leaning, often imperious views of such global institutions as the WHO. Trump’s executive order appears to envision a transition to doctoring global maladies through robust bilateral and multilateral agreements, ordering federal officials to “identify credible and transparent United States and international partners to assume necessary activities previously undertaken by the WHO.” Going forward, Americans must ensure that such bilateral agreements “are representative of the will of the American people, and do not also draw us into other relationships that are equally problematic as the WHO,” said Weber, who attended the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva last May and reported on each day’s proceedings for The Washington Stand. It also orders the director of the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy to “review, rescind, and replace” the Biden-era “2024 U.S. Global Health Security Strategy as soon as practicable.” “While nations need to coordinate to address diseases and other international health crises, they can do so through agreements and relationships that protect their national sovereignty,” Weber told The Washington Stand. While nations need “a mechanism to prevent diseases that cross borders,” Weber warned this accord and others show U.S. national “sovereignty being eroded as global bodies, including the World Health Organization, aggregate power to themselves.” This decision, and other first-day actions by Trump, constitute a new “America First foreign policy, one that serves our interests, and not the interests of diplomats or elite global circles, to the detriment of the American people,” Weber told Hice, praising a separate Trump executive order that “pauses foreign aid for a period of time until the whole system can be reformed.” Originally published by The Washington Stand The post ‘A Healthy Reset’: Trump Withdraws US From World Health Organization appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Victor Davis Hanson, the renowned American historian and political commentator, has joined The Daily Signal as a senior contributor. This transcript has been lightly edited. There’s been a whole change of mentality, from the trivial to the existential. We also learn these disclosures. Why now? Why now? Why did we suddenly learn from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that Joe Biden had had cognitive decline all these years, in which, to point that out was blasphemy. And now, all of a sudden, we hear where we’re right all along. All of you were. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Have you noticed during this transition from the Nov. 5 election to the inauguration of Jan. 20, there’s been a whole change of mentality from the trivial to the existential. We can’t quite believe that. Mika and Joe Scarborough made a religious journey, as it is, to Mar-a-Lago. Snoop Dogg once cut a film about shooting Donald Trump. Now he has endorsed him. And that is true all over the media. They just fired the head of MSNBC. Now we also learn these disclosures. Why now? Why now? Why did we suddenly learn from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that Joe Biden had had cognitive decline all these years in which, to point that out, was blasphemy? Remember Peter Daszak? He was in Echo Health. He was the one who engaged in forbidden gain-of-function viral research. He was getting money from the NIH [National Institutes of Health], transferring it to the Wuhan Laboratory. But, even to say that was considered heresy. And now all of a sudden, we hear we were right all along. All of you were. That there was gain of function research. That we did have a role in the Wuhan Lab. And guess what? Peter Daszak is barred now for five years from receiving one dime of federal health care. How about the FBI? They stonewalled, stonewalled, stonewalled. All of a sudden—suddenly, out of the head of Zeus—they tell us they’re going to abandon, abolish, get rid of their diversity, equity, and inclusion department. And finally, Christopher Wray, in his last address to us, says, well, there are cabals of Chinese espionage activists and they’re in sensitive places. We have to be careful. Why didn’t he tell us that two years ago? Why all of a sudden is Mr. Trudeau stepping down? Why did the Assad dynasty collapse? Why does Hamas want to negotiate? It’s eerie. We’ve never seen anything like it. Why did Joe Biden suddenly abdicate? He’s kind of abdicated from power. Donald Trump is the de facto—and he has been for weeks—president. We’ve never seen anything like it. The obvious answer is, the king is dead. Long live the king. People gravitate toward power, especially when power is expressed by winning the popular vote, the Electoral College, having control of the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and having issues that all polled over 55 to 60%. It was a mandate. And everybody wants to be on the winning side, in the sense, you root for your football team when it’s 10 and zero, and you don’t go to the stadium when it’s zero and 10. There’s another criteria here and that is, a lot of people as they look back, see that what they did to Donald Trump—the lawfare, the Alvin Bragg, the Fani Willis, the Jack Smith, the Latitia James, the E. Jean Carroll, civil and criminal suits—they really were an aberration. They were a miscarriage of justice. And when they’re compounded with the two prior impeachments, the trial of Donald Trump as a private citizen, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid at Mar-a-Lago. A lot of people on the left in the media, in the Democratic Party, in the liberal circle itself are thinking if we were Donald Trump and we had suffered what we did to him and we were in power now, we know what we would do: Revenge. So, they project that onto Donald Trump, and they try to reach out now, whether it’s the media settling defamation suits, or talk that even CBS will settle with Donald Trump. But I don’t think that’s necessarily explains all of this vast change of heart. This new mindset. I think people, as they look back, they think we were in a coma. We were drugged. This was an aberration. Maybe it was the COVID lockdown. Maybe it was the George Floyd. Maybe it was the hatred of Donald Trump. Maybe—I don’t know what it was, but it was a four-year aberration. And now they’re coming to their senses and they’re thinking Joe Biden really was cognitively declined. A coup dismissed him. That was abnormal. The border should be closed. There really is two main sexes, not three. Looting and shoplifting have to be crimes or society will not exist. What happened in Afghanistan, turning over $50 billion to terrorists. That’s not normal. That’s not the United States. Nor is putting “daylight” between us and Israel. So, there’s a sense now that, Rip Van Winkle, like we’ve woken up. And Donald Trump wasn’t a monster. In fact, Donald Trump has common sense answers to all the things of the last four years. So we’re looking back and we’re saying we were mad. And now there’s a common-sense corrective and we don’t really care if it’s Donald Trump or not, but we’re going to go with the corrective and return America to common sense. Thank you. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post America Awakes From Its Coma appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Conservative Harvard students spoke Wednesday at a luncheon in Washington’s Capitol Hill Club, detailing the harsh stigma involved in writing for a conservative publication on an Ivy League campus. “The Protecting Conservative Students at Harvard” luncheon featured student editors of The Harvard Salient, the campus’ conservative magazine, including the outlet’s President Sarah Steele, who told the audience about the intense backlash the publication faces from the left-leaning student body. “In the past year, professors began to ban The Salient from houses [residence halls] altogether,” said Steele, who is in her senior year. “Students would complain to their house faculty and the faculty said, out of convenience, you are now banned from distributing The Salient in the house.” In an interview with The Daily Signal, Steele said that irate students have often destroyed print issues of The Harvard Salient. “We’ve experienced some pretty consistent vandalism with the issues. We find them in the garbage, lots of them. Sometimes they’re maniacally ripped up, up and down the entire dorm hallway,” said Steele. Steele’s classmate Caleb Chung added that Harvard students publicly brag about this vandalism on anonymous forums. Chung, a sophomore, told The Daily Signal, “There’s an anonymous social media platform where people brag about the different ways they destroy The Salient.” But this is not the worst response the conservative publication has received, says Steele. “One of our editors early on received a death threat from a fellow student,” she said to the audience. But despite their serious discussion of the stigma for being a conservative in Cambridge, the students remained proud and optimistic about their work with The Harvard Salient. Among their proudest accomplishments is the “freedom tower,” the publication’s office in Cambridge. Harvard student Victoria Li, a senior, said that purchasing the office offered them a place where they felt physically safe and among like-minded individuals. “We can’t host events without a risk of security, and we thought it was important that conservatives have a physical place on campus. What paper on campus lasted for more than a few years without a physical property?” she said. “The [Harvard] Lampoon has a castle in the middle of Harvard Square!” But The Harvard Salient editors told The Daily Signal that, even outside of their work in conservative journalism, they feel the stigma surrounding their social and political attitudes. Steele says that this is especially true in classroom settings. “Just in a seminar class when you’re at a round table, you think the purpose is to get as many conflicting ideas out on the table for the academic exercise. But it’s very hard to put yourself out there, especially if you’re talking about social conservatism,” she said. Chung agreed, telling The Daily Signal, “Sometimes it’s very explicit. So, my freshman year, I took a seminar. We’re talking about gender and identity, and the professor was very clear that traditional views would not be accepted. You can’t go and say these things in the classroom. Socially, there’s a stigma.” Also in attendance at the luncheon was former Trump administration Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who contributed to the publication during his time at Harvard Alfredo Ortiz, a board member of The Harvard Salient who assists the students in their mission, urged the audience not to give up on bringing ideological balance to Ivy League schools. “Harvard is still Harvard. Our CEOs and our CFOs and our doctors and our judges and our presidents, leaders, thought leaders still come out of Harvard,” said Ortiz, the CEO of the Job Creators Network. “And the more we kind of let it go, the more this social left malaise continues to affect our country.” The post Harvard Students Describe ‘Stigma’ Around Conservatism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

White House reporter Reagan Reese says she had more interactions with President Donald Trump in just one day than she did with President Joe Biden over the year and a half she spent covering the Biden White House.  It was not unusual for the Biden administration to “call a lid,” a term used to dismiss White House reporters at the end of the news day, around 4:00 p.m., according to Reese. If the first two days in office are any indication, Reese says she expects to be working much longer hours while Trump is in office.  Even after leaving the White House at 7 p.m. Tuesday night, Reese, who has worked as The Daily Caller’s White House correspondent since August 2023, said Trump was still working in the Oval Office.  Reese joins this week’s edition of “Problematic Women” to discuss the first 48 hours of the Trump administration and Trump’s interactions with the press since he was sworn in on Monday.  Also on today’s show, we discuss the slew of executive orders Trump has already signed on issues ranging from securing the southern border to requiring some federal employees to return to in person work. Plus, we share our favorite fashion looks from Inauguration Day! Pour yourself a cup of tea and join “Problematic Women” by clicking the video above. The post White House Reporter Gives Inside Scoop on Difference Between Trump and Biden appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump kicked off his second term this week by pardoning the more than 1,500 Americans charged with crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol protest. Pardoning the Jan. 6 prisoners is “another promise made, promise kept from the president,” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal.  “It is shameful right now to see that there are still people that, four years later, have not had a fair trial, have not had a trial at all,” he said.  All Americans have a constitutional right to a “speedy trial,” Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said, adding: “If you haven’t actually given them a trial in four years … that’s a problem.” The Daily Signal spoke with Clyde, McCormick, and a number of other Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday regarding Trump’s decision to issue pardons for so many Americans who have sat in prison for four years since the uprising.  “It’s the right thing,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., said of Trump’s action in pardoning those who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  “The fact that there’s been so little due process for those from Jan. 6th, it says a lot to all of us as Americans that there wasn’t an effort to really find out and get to the bottom of what happened,” he said. Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, called it “heartbreaking” that “people who committed, at the most, misdemeanor trespassing” spent four years in prison. “At the same time,” Babin added, “you had people who burned whole sections of American cities after the George Floyd incident, yet nothing happened to them.” That was a reference to the May 2020 death of Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. The pardons are “exactly the right thing to do, to put this long nightmare behind us,” according to Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas.  The pardon names 14 specific individuals who were involved in the event inside and around the Capitol four years ago, including Stewart Rhodes, who is the founder of the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization whose local affiliates are often made up of military veterans and first responders.  The pardon then declares the release of “all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”  Rep. Derek Schmidt, R-Kan., said that if he were in the president’s shoes, he would have been hesitant to pardon those who “assaulted law enforcement,” but he “respects the president’s decision.” “Overall, he moved us in the right direction, to move that piece of history behind us,” he said.  Rep. Mike Haridopolos, R-Fla., said the Jan. 6 prisoners broke the law, but “four years for trespassing is more than enough.”  “This two-tiered system of justice is wrong,” he said, referring to what some Republicans say is the unequal application of the law against friends and foes of the Biden-Harris administration. When asked about the pardons, Rep. Addison McDowell, R-N.C., pointed to the pardons issued by President Joe Biden shortly before he left office. Biden preemptively pardoned several members of his own family, COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci, and notably, members and staff of the Democrat-controlled special January 6 committee. “At the end of the day, I’m not worried about pardons,” he said. “I’m worried about the border and the economy.”  Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., said a lot of the Jan. 6 protesters were in jail or prison because they were charged with trespassing, while Capitol Police stood by and let people enter the Capitol. “The president said in his address yesterday there are murderers who have gotten shorter sentences than some of the people on Jan. 6,” said Harris, chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., echoed Harris, promising “a lot of questions will be answered in years to come, because why were some of the police letting protesters in?”  Trump’s pardons are different from Biden’s preemptive pardons of his family members, according to Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich. The Department of Justice failed to distinguish between violent criminals and people who made a mistake on Jan. 6, Huizenga said, adding that he heard of a young mom going to pick up her husband from prison after he was released early Tuesday morning.  “Those kinds of stories are the positive ones, where we’re seeing really nonviolent folks who had been trespassing and maybe made some bad decisions, had a very much overzealous Department of Justice go after them in a way,” Huizenga said, “unlike what they should have done with others that did have violent intent and were violent.”  “He’s not just issuing blanket pardons as well, which I think is a sign of some restraint, as they are going through and trying to distinguish who deserves that,” the Michigan Republican continued.  Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., said Trump campaigned on pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, so people should not be surprised.  “To hear the moaning on the other side, that they were surprised, that they couldn’t believe he had done this,” Guest said. “He’s been telling people for months this would be one of his actions, and he followed through, and did what President Trump does, which is to honor the promises he makes to the American public.”  The post ‘It’s the Right Thing’: GOP Lawmakers React to Trump’s Pardon of Jan. 6 ‘Political Prisoners’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.