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.

After a new “gender self-ID” policy was enacted in New Jersey last year, 27 transgender inmates moved into the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Thomas English

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday barring biological males — who account for 15% of inmates in women’s federal prisons — from occupying women’s federal detention facilities.

The order, which prohibits federal funds for gender transition medical procedures, drugs and treatment, mandates that the federal government only recognize male and female sexes and requires inmates to be housed according to their biological sex. Of the 10,047 total inmates in women’s federal facilities, 1,538 are biological males, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

“The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers,” the order reads. It adds that no federal funds shall be expended for “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”

The order also reversed the past policy of allowing biological males into ostensibly “single-sex” domestic abuse shelters for women and mandated that government-issued identification reflect the bearer’s biological sex — meaning no “X” marker designating an undefined or unlisted gender will be recognized.

The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group, celebrated the end of what it called “utter unfairness of allowing men into women’s spaces.”

Several pro-LGBT advocacy organizations, such as Lambda Legal, have already signaled an intention to mount a legal challenge against the executive order, arguing it is unconstitutional and violates existing law.

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz grilled Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn for allowing a biological male — and convicted serial child rapist — into women’s facility in May, accusing Netburn of being “willing to subjugate the rights of individuals to satisfy your political ideology.”

Several incidents of rape and sexual assault involving biological male inmates in female facilities have surfaced in recent years. A biological male at Rikers Island in New York City was convicted in 2022 of raping a female inmate while housed in the women’s prison wing. A similar case occurred in 2024, where another biological male was convicted in California of raping a female inmate in the showers of the prison’s female facilities.

It is unclear when the transfer of biological men to men’s prison facilities will begin.