From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Roderick Law

President Donald Trump has hit the ground running, issuing a flurry of executive orders. Two of them are particularly welcome.

The first, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” mandates agencies across the government cease funding and end any activities that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” The other, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” requires agencies “to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”

Each order is necessary, and their issuance so soon after the inauguration shows that Trump understands that censorship and “lawfare” were rampant under his predecessor.

Former President Joe Biden himself (or whoever gave him words to read) gave us a stark reminder of his comfort with censorship in his farewell address, when he warned of the “potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.”

But Biden was referring to the rise of social media that do not enforce speech codes dictated by one side of the political divide. He went on to complain that we are getting “buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” while “[s]ocial media is giving up fact-checking.”

It’s true: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg saw the election results and realized public toleration for censorship has reached its limit. He is dismantling Facebook’s “fact checking” apparatus and following X’s “community notes” model.

Worse, Zuckerburg is telling tales out of school, recalling how during the pandemic Biden officials would “scream” and “curse” at Facebook employees to remove posts that countered the government line. Tech-industrial complexes are dangerous things if you do not control them.

We can’t forget that government censorship, and its support for research into censorship technologies, is broad and deep. Consider the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working very closely with government personnel. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) discovered they also worked with left-wing activists. The committee was created ostensibly in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” It had a “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” subcommittee. “Mal-information” is info that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Trump’s order directly calls such efforts a “guise” to censor speech “in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.” Unfortunately, the committee was the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon and the State Department had their own ties to censorship initiatives.

The same impulse that fostered censorship weaponized Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice(DOJ). Ask pro-life activists facing prison sentences for peaceful demonstrations outside abortion clinics.

Going back further, talk to parents who, FGI discovered, were called racist and transphobic by teachers unions and the Biden Education Department. Or the concerned parents who dared to speak up in school board meetings around the country. Their reward was being called a threat and singled out by the DOJ and FBI. We can be thankful to whoever it was that leaked the FBI memo recommending infiltrating Catholic Mass enthusiast cells.

Trump’s executive order on weaponization will hopefully right some of these wrongs and remind the DOJ and intelligence services that they work for the people. (The president also stripped security clearances from the 51 former intelligence officials who, without evidence, dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “Russian information operation.”) If nothing else, it will make clear to all, no matter their party, that there are no grey areas and no workarounds when it comes to fundamental constitutional rights.

The federal government has strayed far from its purpose of securing the God-given rights of its citizens. Trump received a mandate from the voters to move it back to the true path, and these orders bring vital reforms. Ideally, Congress will follow suit and pass legislation doing the same, but permanently. As Americans, it is the least we should expect from our government.

Roderick Law is the communications director for the Functional Government Initiative.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Organizers and attendees at this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, had to have been shocked at the new tone from the United States after four years of subservient obeisance from Joe Biden and his ineffective emissaries. In a wide-ranging speech via videoconference on Thursday, President Donald Trump essentially blew up the liberal world order consensus as it relates to the climate alarm agenda.

After putting the conference on notice that the United States would again become a sovereign nation with secure borders, Trump then turned to climate and energy policy. “I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal – I call it the Green New scam,” Trump began, “withdrew from the one-sided Paris climate Accord and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate. We’re going to let people buy the car they want to buy.”

It was an opening salvo that flew directly in the face of remarks made earlier in the week by the likes of European Commission leader Ursula Von Der Leyen, John Kerry, Al Gore, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and many others. But Trump was far from done.

“I declared a national energy emergency to unlock the liquid gold under our feet and pave the way for rapid approvals of new energy infrastructure,” he informed the conference, adding, “The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we’re going to use it.”

The message was crystal clear: The age of America conforming its energy and climate policies to fit the strictures of the liberal world order as formulated at international climate conferences organized by the WEF and the United Nations is over, at least for the next four years and possibly beyond that. It should be obvious to everyone by now that Trump intends to completely reverse the Biden Green New Deal agenda and implement policies designed to return the U.S. to the position of what he calls “energy dominance” achieved during Trump’s first presidency.

The net-zero fantasy goal has gone completely off the rails over the last two years as both the ESG and DEI philosophies fell into disrepute. The fading of those interrelated leftwing religions led major energy companies and the banking community alike to place heavier focus on mounting and financing major energy projects designed to enhance energy and national security.

Energy reality was already making a comeback before Trump emerged triumphant in the 2024 election. Despite these and other emerging realities, the WEF’s old guard came to Davos armed with the same old rhetoric.

Sec. Gen. Guterres, always eager to engage in laughable hyperbole, labeled the oil industry a “Frankenstein monster sparing nothing and no one” as it sows what he calls “climate chaos.”

Von Der Leyen’s bombast was no less absurd: “Heat waves across Asia. Floods from Brazil to Indonesia, from Africa to Europe, wildfires in Canada, Greece and California, hurricanes in the US and the Caribbean. Climate change is still on top of the global agenda,” she warned, sounding for all the world like Bill Murray and his fellow “Ghostbusters” in the famous “dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria!” scene from the 1984 film.

Kerry was somewhat more muted, likely due to the fact that he no longer holds any official role in representing U.S. interests. Gore essentially mailed it in, delivering virtually the same hyperbole-filled remarks he spewed to the 2024 conference.

But a pair of participants in a panel discussion held Wednesday were much more realistic.

Graham Allison, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned his audience not to underestimate the new president. “Trump has done something no person in the world has ever done before,” he said, adding, “A dead man, a dead politician has risen. This is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician.”

Longtime political columnist Walter Russel Mead added, “We need to also factor in not only who’s won, which is Trump, but who’s lost. Which is to say, us.”

He isn’t wrong, and the elitists who make up the liberal world order would do well to pay attention. Whether they like it or not, their world has changed.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.