September 24, 2025

The Case Of Bolsonaro: What They Had In Mind For Trump

September 24, 2025/ Francis Menton

Donald Trump is now President of the United States for a second term, having survived an unprecedented campaign of lawfare that has included no fewer than four criminal prosecutions, two state and two federal, brought during the four years that he was out of office. All were brought by highly partisan Democratic Party prosecutors.
The four prosecutions of Trump are all now essentially dead.
However, much of the process of killing off these prosecutions has occurred either since Trump’s re-election, or only because of the fortuity of Trump getting enough appointments to the Supreme Court during his first four years in office to have an effective majority on that Court.

September 20, 2025

Do Not Give Up The High Ground On Freedom Of Speech!

September 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

The four years of the Biden presidency were a terrible low point for the protection of freedom of speech in the U.S. A web of government agencies and allied NGOs sprang up with remarkable rapidity to identify and ban disfavored speech, almost always of conservatives.
As just a few examples: the White House itself pressured social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech on politically sensitive topics like Covid and climate change; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency collaborated with universities and NGOs like the Stanford Internet Observatory to get disfavored speech banned or suppressed; the Department of Homeland Security formed a Disinformation Governance Board to coerce social media companies to suppress speech deemed “disinformation”; and the FBI conducted wide-ranging investigations of Republican politicians and organizations.
The entire enterprise got the accurate nickname of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
This was an extremely important issue that drove many voters to Trump. After Trump was elected, we had every reason to expect that efforts like those of the prior administration to coerce the suppression of opponents’ speech of would come to an end. And, for the most part, they have.
However, the past week has seen two bad unforced errors on the freedom of speech front by high-ranking members of the Trump administration:

September 17, 2025

September 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

Yesterday, along with two excellent colleagues, I submitted a Comment to EPA on the subject of the proposed and pending repeal of the so-called Endangerment Finding of 2009.
The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the absurd regulatory action by which the Obama-era EPA purported to find that the trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) constitutes a “danger” to human health and welfare as it accumulates in the atmosphere from the current level of about 0.04%, to perhaps 0.05% or maybe even (the horror!) 0.06% by some time later this century.
The EF is then the basis for all the subsequent regulatory initiatives by the Obama and Biden administrations to regulate and suppress the production and use of hydrocarbon fuels. These initiatives have included things like rules to force the closure of all coal and natural gas power plants by some time in the 2030s; mileage rules for automobiles that would ratchet up over time until no gasoline-powered car could comply (also by some time in the 2030s); restrictions on oil and gas leases on federal lands; blocking the construction of pipelines; and even regulations that have made it so that dishwashers and washing machines don’t work very well any more.
Here is a link to our Comment.

September 15, 2025

September 15, 2025/ Francis Menton

On Saturday (September 13) something called the Columbia Academic Freedom Council held a day-long conference here in New York. The Council used the event to hand out awards to some 23 recipients.
Each of the recipients had not only been punished or ostracized somehow for speaking out as a dissenter from the groupthink of academia, but had also fought back in some way.
The day’s program was organized into a series of panels, where each panel’s members were award recipients who got to tell their stories. The recipients included some prominent academics from elite institutions, but also some from less-well-known places, including some from community colleges and high schools.
The entire program was some 10 hours long. I was able to stay for about half of it. In many cases I was familiar with the story of the award recipient, but in many others I was not. I thought readers might be interested in the personal stories from a sample of some of the more and less prominent recipients.

September 12, 2025

September 12, 2025/ Francis Menton

It’s been a very sad few weeks, first with the tragic and senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina on August 22, and now with the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10.
These two killings have suddenly focused the attention of a lot of previously complacent people, and provided some very useful education about the kind of world we live in. But what are the lessons to take away?
One possible lesson is that the world is just irretrievably filled with anger and hate, to the extent that the best that sensible people can do is withdraw into their bunker, keep out of blue states and away from people who follow leftist and woke ideology, stick to a limited circle of family and friends, and avoid dealing with the broader world to the maximum extent possible.
I do not subscribe to that approach.

September 08, 2025

September 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

As I have written many times, with New York’s fantasy “net zero” energy plans, it is not a question of whether they will fail, but only when and how.
The Democrats, who dominate state politics, and their environmentalist allies, are firmly committed to the impossible. Thus, they are caught in a trap of their own making, and from which there is no good escape. The fact that they are caught in this trap is obvious to anyone with basic arithmetic skills, but almost all of our politicians and environmentalists lack those.
However, a small handful of them are starting to sense the impending crash. This makes for amusing interplay.
The state’s Climate Act of 2019 directs hostility to fossil fuels on all fronts.