WND

President Trump has made it clear that he is dead serious about cutting the federal budget deficit and even becoming the first president in a quarter-century to actually balance the budget.

He has his work cut out for him. The deficit for the last year of the Biden administration was $1.87 trillion – about $5,500 in new borrowing for every person in America. The total federal debt has passed $36 trillion, or about $106,000 per person. This burden, left unchecked, will destroy America’s prosperity and leave a legacy of ashes to our children and grandchildren.

Through the sweeping cuts of DOGE and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s call for a significant reduction in defense spending, President Trump has made it clear he wasn’t kidding about his plans to fix America’s spending problem before it’s too late. But if he’s to achieve as much as we need him to, President Trump needs another tool in his arsenal: the impoundment of federal funds.

Mention “impoundment,” and most Americans will think of what happens when their car gets towed, but it’s nothing so sinister as that. Presidential impoundment literally just means not spending money. That’s it. More specifically, it refers to when the president, instead of spending all the money handed to him by Congress, returns it back to the American people. It’s the president’s way of saying, in effect, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At the moment, presidential impoundment is sharply restricted, thanks to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. The act only lets a president delay spending funds for a matter of weeks; actually, returning the money can only be done with the explicit approval of Congress.

The act undid nearly two centuries of constitutional practice and was passed at the height of the Watergate scandal when the Nixon administration was particularly weak (he would resign only a month later). Prior to Nixon, almost every American president had engaged in impoundment, and the practice was almost universally regarded as legal. Instead of a president being compelled to spend any money given to him, the roles of the branches were understood this way: Congress had the power to set a maximum on spending through appropriation, while the president had the power to determine how much was actually spent, especially in the realms of military or foreign affairs. In 1803, for instance, President Jefferson returned $50,000 that Congress had appropriated to build gunboats on the Mississippi River, explaining that in his view as commander in chief, the gunboats were no longer necessary and the funds should be saved.

In 1876, after signing the Rivers and Harbors Bill, President Grant explicitly announced that he would not spend much of the money appropriated in the bill because he believed much of the spending was pork purely benefiting local interests rather than the entire country. Many in Congress complained, but there was no lawsuit arguing that Grant’s actions were unconstitutional – and in fact, about half the money went unspent.

Even FDR, creator of the modern administrative bureaucratic state, held to this view of presidential impoundment, citing economic emergency or the outbreak of World War II as a justification for impounding hundreds of millions of dollars in funds allocated for ROTC, flood control, construction projects, and much more. Shortly after World War II, Harry Truman impounded half the entire appropriation for the National Guard. Two years later, he took a pass on building two new aircraft carriers for which Congress had approved the money.

This understanding of impoundment fits in perfectly with the vision of the presidency as described in the Constitution. Article II is quite succinct when it comes to the powers of the president. He is commander in chief of the military, he appoints all officers of the United States, he conducts diplomacy with foreign nations, and he is responsible for seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. Executing the laws – spending the money that Congress has given him – is the job of the president and those beneath him whom he appoints, and no one else. Congress makes the laws, defines the mission, and sets the budget, but the president executes – that is what it means to have two co-equal branches of government.

Yet the Impoundment Control Act tries to throw out this constitutional arrangement completely, instead giving the Government Accountability Office (an independent agency) the power to sue a president for not spending money correctly. Rather than assert its own role directly, Congress has ordered the executive branch to sue itself – a constitutional absurdity.

The Impoundment Control Act, then, is likely unconstitutional, and even if it isn’t, its results have been disastrous. Without any power for the president to economize on spending or make quick cuts where necessary, Washington has been defined by endless bloat. Every department and every agency spends its entire budget every year, then howls that more money is needed – after all, they completely ran out the year before! Congress mindlessly votes for more spending every year. The president, the only person with the incentive and the agency to save money, has been rendered a powerless functionary.

This must change. If the president is equal to Congress, then while they have the power to fund a program, he has to have the power to say when those funds are not needed – or when spending them would lead our country into a preventable disaster.

For the United States to credibly deter China from war, ships are needed now, not decades from now. The lack of available ships in the Navy’s fleet has eroded the deterrent effect of America’s sea power and unless current plans and policies are radically altered, China’s power will remain unchecked and undeterred.

The abysmal state of our maritime industrial base makes the goal of a 380 ship Navy seem like fantasy and the idea of scrapping existing ships to build new destroyers and a new frigate perverse.

Two retired Naval Service officers have proposed a solution that is doable, affordable, and common sense in the near term. Colonel TX Hammes Captain R. Robinson Harris writing in the Naval Institute’s Proceedings have proposed putting missiles and lethal reconnaissance drones aboard converted commercial ships in launch containers. This makes eminent sense for several reasons.

First, the hulls already exist. This would go a long way to easing the Navy’s shipbuilding woes until the industrial base problem gets solved.

Second, because merchant vessels are highly automated, the need for additional manning would be minimal and can be tasked to the merchant mariners being a purely defensive weapon, thus leaving the Navy to focus on reaching their goals of readiness and lethality.

Manning the Merchant Marines and the U.S. Navy is yet another headwind facing the current maritime crisis. Recruiting is a problem for all the services. Although President Trump hopes Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will help to entice recruits through invigorating the military’s core mission of warfighting and lethality.

Although early, recruiting numbers are ticking upward and it is relatively easy to recruit trained merchant seamen to man the Navy-Marine Corps Maritime Pre-positioning Ship Program which is now moribund due to some poor decisions on the part of the Marine Corps and a lack of attention to the ailing merchant marines by an poorly managed Maritime Administration.

Hammes and Harris also correctly note that the number of combatant ships in the fleet is less important than the amount of firepower they can generate – a more lethal warfighting fleet. This was the secret of the royal Navy in the Days of Admirals Hood, Rodney, and Nelson. Well drilled British tars could generate a third to a half more firepower in an engagement than their Spanish and French foes.

The authors point out that eight of these “fireships” could be purchased for the price of a single frigate and at the current capability of American shipyards, by my estimate sixteen such fireships could be procured before a single frigate could be launched. In addition, container ships are very hard to sink.

However, as the authors point out, the fly in the ointment here is that the Navy cannot procure enough missiles to supply the ships that it has today much less equip the fireships. The good news here is that the United States can increase its capability to produce missiles and drones much faster that it can build ships.

I have been a “rocket-in-the box” advocate for a long time. In these pages and other publications (Beyond Mahan: A Proposal for a U.S. Naval Strategy in the Twenty-First Century), I have advocated strapping enhanced combat modules on warships deemed obsolete by the Navy, such as the Ticonderoga class cruisers rather the turning to them into razor blades or coral reefs which the Navy has also done with its large deck amphibious fleet.

This is why we can no longer provide a 24/7 Marine Corps presence in the world’s worst trouble spots. Instead, the Navy is planning on producing overpriced, and useless Landing Ship Medium (LSM) to support a failed Marine Corps operational strategy to fire obsolete anti-ship missiles from islands in China’s first island chain. Cancellation of the LSM program would go a long way toward affording fireships ships and enough real amphibs to present a credible deterrent to China and globally.

Beyond the scope of Hammes and Harris’s concept for arming merchant ships but complementary is the use deception in the event of conflict. Large merchant ships can also be used as “lily pads” for VSTOL F-35 strike aircraft to get closer than large aircraft carriers to help degrade the Chinese reconnaissance-strike complex.

Purchasing obsolete merchant vessels to become robotized decoy fireships would make the Chinese targeting problem more difficult. Wasting resources and missiles, the Chinese would also be creating a targeting signature for the U.S. Forces.

Employing this concept would provide the first step in degrading the Chinese reconnaissance-strike complex allowing aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships freedom of movement to advance power projection through distributed maritime operations.

Change is needed not if the U.S. expects to credibly deter the China from armed conflict in the Indo-Pacific or win if a war is forced upon us.

The imminent, needed change must be thrust upon the admirals by the Secretary of Defense and the new SECNAV in coordination with Congress.  While DOGE has been lightning fast with uncovering fraud waste and abuse, they are not navalists, but together they can reverse the current losing business model and right the ship toward maritime dominance America was once known for.

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Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who was Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

On Thursday, the New York Times (NYT), alongside several other mainstream media outlets, published a biased analysis of new studies indicating infant mortality increased by six percent in states that enacted pro-life laws.

The implication of these analyses is that, as CNN puts it, “abortion bans” are actually “exacerbating existing health disparities” and leading to more infant deaths than before abortion was restricted. This perspective, however, fails to take into account that, prior to the enactment of the pro-life laws in question, thousands of infants each year were killed in the womb before their deaths could be counted toward an “infant mortality” rate.

Furthermore, the NYT and other outlets have characterized the increased occurrences of infant death as unfortunate consequences of mothers being unable to choose to kill their children in advance. Dr. Alyssa Bilinski, one researcher cited by the NYT, writes that, “The groups that are most likely to have children as a result of abortion bans are also individuals who are most likely, for a number of different reasons, to have higher rates of infant mortality.”

The two groups that the NYT singles out as suffering most from greater incidence of infant mortality are mothers of infants who are either Black or have a disability – children who, prior to the enactment of pro-life laws, would also have been most at risk to be aborted based on historical data.

“All of these ‘excess’ children who were born would have been killed in induced abortions,” Dr. Donna Harrison, director of research for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetrician and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), told the NYT. “This means that anyone lamenting the results of this study isn’t really concerned that these babies died; rather, they wish they would have been killed earlier: in the womb.”

Claim #1: “Infant mortality increased along with births in most states with abortion bans in the first 18 months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade […]”

The majority of mainstream media outlets reporting on the newly-released data have emphasized the claim that infant mortality increased in states after the enactment of pro-life laws prohibiting abortions. What the NYT and other pro-abortion commentators fail to mention, however, is that the only state where a statistically significant change in infant mortality was observed was Texas; all other states considered in the study displayed no difference from zero.

While the NYT acknowledges the outsized impact of Texas data on the study as a whole, the outlet fails to note that, without the inclusion of Texas, the study could not have identified a change in infant mortality.

Claim #2: “[…] in the states that implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks’ gestation during that period, there were 478 more deaths of babies […] than would have been expected based on previous years’ data.”

The NYT implies that the enactment of pro-life laws led to the deaths of more infants than would have been expected based on historical data. Considering the thousands of infants that pro-life laws save from being killed in the womb each year, however, infant mortality has decreased in every state with a pro-life protection in place.

While the increased rate of infant mortality is based on an additional 478 infants who died in their first year of life than would have been expected, estimates show over 22,000 children were born because of safeguards for children in the womb. Though the death of any infant, preborn or born, is undoubtedly a tragedy, the actual survival outcome for infants is far improved in states that have enacted laws protecting human life in the womb.

Claim #3: “When women are not allowed to end pregnancies of fetuses with congenital anomalies, the babies often die within days or weeks after birth.”

Pro-abortion commentators often claim that exceptions to pro-life laws in cases of a prenatal diagnosis of a disability, especially those considered life-limiting or “lethal,” are necessary to prevent suffering and trauma for the mother and infant. In this article, the NYT makes the bizarre claim that, when mothers cannot kill a child with a life-limiting disability in the womb, the child will likely go on to die soon after birth, thus contributing to infant mortality numbers.

According to those with experience handling the death of an infant from a life-limiting disability, such as parents and perinatal hospice staff, choosing life for a child likely to die soon after birth prevents a greater tragedy. In either event, the infant may die – the difference is only whether he or she is intentionally killed in the womb or dies naturally after birth while receiving comfort and love from his or her family.

Furthermore, physicians note that prenatal testing is often inaccurate in diagnosing the presence of disabilities, including life-limiting ones; inaccurate prenatal testing has led to many children being aborted who may have gone on to be born without any challenges at all. In a video for Live Action, neonatologist Dr. Kendra Kolb explains that, “If allowed to be born, some of these babies may in fact turn out to be perfectly healthy if they were misdiagnosed, and others may indeed have some special needs, but ultimately live a long and happy life.”

There is more to be done – but pro-life laws are preventing infant deaths in the meantime

One central conclusion of both the NYT article and the research studies themselves is that increases in infant mortality are indicative of gaps in health care and other areas of need for vulnerable parents. As the NYT put it, “nobody is in favor of infants dying.”

In that case, however, the outlet should be happy to know that pro-life laws are not causing infant deaths, but rather saving thousands of infants’ lives each year.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is “hopeful” Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will sign a rare earth minerals deal with President Donald Trump this week, adding that “the Russians hate this deal.”

Appearing on “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, Bessent said: “Common to a lot of misperceptions, the Russians hate this deal.”

“The morning that I arrived in Ukraine to get into Kyiv … you fly to Poland, you take a 10- hour night if train in. The Russians, unfortunately, bombed Kyiv. There was a missile barrage four hours before I got there.

“It was the first time that such a barrage had a taken place since November. So I think that was a strong signal from Russian leadership that they don’t like this deal because it gives President Trump more negotiating leverage.

“So if the Russians don’t like it, my view is Ukrainians should.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent: ‘The Russians hate this deal’

‘It gives President Trump more negotiating leverage. So if the Russians don’t like it, my view is Ukrainians should’ pic.twitter.com/LfPAzKqPBE

— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) February 23, 2025

“President Trump created this idea himself. It is a win-win,” Bessent continued.

“We make money if the Ukrainian people make money, and I believe that with the United States of America, our know-how, our businesses willing to to come in and provide capital, that we can accelerate the Ukrainian growth trajectory and take in substantial monies for the U.S. taxpayers and get the Ukrainian economy on a growth, great growth trajectory.”

Is the news we hear every day actually broadcasting messages from God? The answer is an absolute yes! Find out how!

While Bessent expects Zelenskyy will sign the deal, he added, “What it does not include is a military guarantee.”

“What it does include is an implicit guarantee that if the if United States of America is heavily invested in the economic future, I call it an economic security guarantee. The more assets that U.S. companies have on the ground, the bigger interest that the U.S. has in the future of Ukrainian economy doing well, the more security it creates for the Ukrainian people and the higher the return for the U.S. taxpayer.

“Again, President Trump has structured this win-win deal, and it’s unfortunate that, you know, after by meeting with President Zelenskyy and then his meeting in Munich with Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, the idea here of my trip to Ukraine and then the meeting in Munich, we want to intertwine the U.S. and Ukrainian economies for the benefit of both.

“And, unfortunately, President Zelenskyy seems to have put a bit of daylight between us, but I am sure in the long run, or in the short run there is no daylight, the deal will be signed, and this will give President Trump a lever. And it will be a strong signal to Russian leadership that the U.S. is in a serious partnership with the Ukrainian people.”

Bessent also praised Trump’s cost-cutting measures by Elon Musk and DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, hammering what he called “orgiastic government spending” by Joe Biden’s administration.

“I think that if we have a bloated government, and if that gets cut down, then government spending will go down,” he explained. “Many times … in the past ten months I’ve talked about reprivatizing the economy, and that’s what we’re going to have to do.

“We’ve seen what I would call this orgiastic government spending with the past administration. We’re running 6.7%, 6.9% deficits to GDP which we’ve never had when we’re not in a recession, not in a war. And we’re going to bring that down. So as the government employment comes down, private sector will not be crowded out anymore.

“All the jobs created by the Biden, not all, but 70%, 85% of the jobs created by the Biden administration were government jobs, government-adjacent. They crowded out the private sector. The government interest rates spiked. I would just point out interest rates are down five weeks in a row … since President Trump took office.”

Follow Joe on X @JoeKovacsNews

Topline: New York City angered its drivers with new “congestion pricing” for travel into Manhattan below 60^th Street, but perhaps officials should be more focused on collecting the tolls they already charge.

Drivers across the state managed to dodge $5.1 billion in tolls in the four years from 2021 to 2024, according to the New York Post.

Key facts: The dollar total is much higher than New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority had indicated in previous statements. Officials claimed the state agency loses $800 million per year to toll and fare evasion from cars, buses and subways combined. In reality, cars alone cost $1.4 billion in 2024, the New York Post found.

The problem worsened when the MTA installed cashless toll booths in 2017. The old booths had gates that only lowered when drivers paid their toll. Now, most drivers use a special “E-ZPass” that pays the toll automatically.

But if drivers don’t have an E-ZPass, they get a bill in the mail — which goes unpaid 49% of the time, MTA reports have shown.

Of those missed payments, only 8.2% were eventually collected, the MTA said. An anonymous source told the Post that the MTA only has one collection agency on contract, but the missed tolls are “too much for any one firm to handle.”

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Critical quote: Rep. Mike Lawler, of the lower Hudson Valley, told the Post, the situation is “really pathetic.”

“Between fare jumpers and toll beaters, the MTA is losing a staggering $2 billion per year,” Lawler said. “This level of gross negligence is criminal, plain and simple. The MTA needs an immediate forensic audit and a complete purge of its incompetent management team.”

Background: Driving is only one way that commuters travel, specially in the city. Fare dodgers cost almost $700 million in one year by hopping subway turnstiles.

Luckily, the city has gained insight into the “psychobehavioral drivers” that motivate fare evasion, thanks to a $1 million study conducted last year.

Summary: The MTA’s budget deficit may reach $3 billion by 2028. Properly collecting tolls would go a long way toward fixing the crisis.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted that in 2001, we’d have crewed spacecraft that can venture to Jupiter and supercomputers with artificial general intelligence. These predictions didn’t come true. In 1982, Blade Runner showcased a dystopic 2019 Earth with flying cars, advanced holographic technologies, and AI replicants nearly indistinguishable from humans. Those forecasts missed the mark. Seven years later, Back to the Future Part II envisioned a 2015 America with hoverboards, flying cars, food rehydrators, and cold fusion power generators fueled by trash. Sadly none of these innovations have arrived.

In 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement set a goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 through a combination of renewable energy, efficiency gains, and carbon capture. Though humanity still has a quarter-century to hit that lofty mark, we appear destined to fail.

Countries, cities, businesses, and organizations worldwide followed Paris negotiators’ lead in pledging to reach Net Zero by 2050, and made bold claims that they would do so. But, just as science fiction writers can be overly optimistic with their visions of the future, so, too can diplomats forging a framework to tackle climate change.

Vaclav Smil is one of the leading thinkers on energy and the environment. Last year, the Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba penned an extensive report for the The Fraser Institute, a libertarian-conservative Canadian public policy think tank. In it, he outlined numerous reasons why Net Zero by 2050 is highly unlikely.

He began with a glaring fact.

“Despite international agreements, government spending and regulations, and technological advancements, global fossil fuel consumption surged by 55 percent between 1997 and 2023.”

While fossil fuels make up a declining share of civilization’s overall energy mix, falling from 86 percent in 1997 to 82 percent in 2022, their use in absolute terms is still rising as humans demand more and more energy.

But why can’t we just electrify everything and replace fossil fuel energy with renewables and nuclear? We have the technology, after all. And 25 years is a long time…

Smil describes the enormity of this undertaking, and why a quarter-century is a blip on the timescale of energy transitions.

“The first global energy transition, from traditional biomass fuels such as wood and charcoal to fossil fuels, started more than two centuries ago and unfolded gradually. That transition remains incomplete, as billions of people still rely on traditional biomass energies for cooking and heating.”

Alright, but what if humanity aligns towards decarbonization? Well, that naive dream of cooperation is burst by real world actions.

“China is far from done with its massive use of fossil fuel: its coal output reached a new record in 2022 and the country approved the construction of 106 gigawatts of new coal-fired power, the highest capacity since 2015.”

India is almost certain to follow China’s lead as its 1.4 billion inhabitants insist on a higher standard of living.

And there’s another roadblock: incorporating intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar into an aged grid on a grand scale.

“The IEA has estimated that meeting the global decarbonization goals would require adding or refurbishing more than 80 million kilometres of transmission grids by 2040. That is the equivalent of the entire existing global grid in 2023.”

And then there’s the fact that humanity still lacks viable zero-carbon options for commercial processes that produce essential materials such as steel for infrastructure and ammonia for fertilizer.

“These two key material processes… would need an annual production capacity of some 135 million tons of green hydrogen by 2050. However, depending on additional needs for transportation and heating, from industries (from glassmaking to food preservation), and for peak electricity generation, the total demand for green hydrogen could be easily as high as 500 million tons by 2050, [requiring] about 25 PWh of green electricity, the total equal to about 86 percent of the 2022 global electricity use.”

And then we get to the matter of cost…

[McKinsey’s Global Institute’s] estimate of $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050 prorates to $9.2 trillion a year. Compared to the 2022 global GDP of $101 trillion, this implies an annual expenditure on the order of 10 percent of the total worldwide economic product for three decades.

Not since World War II has the world seen targeted spending on this scale.

Smil admits that while a complete transition to Net Zero is incredibly unlikely. It is possible.

“No natural laws bar us from making the enormous investments needed to sustain such massive annual shifts.”

But at the same time, we must dwell in reality.

“We should devote our efforts to charting realistic futures that consider our technical capabilities, our material supplies, our economic possibilities, and our social necessities—and then devise practical ways to achieve them. We can always strive to surpass them—a far better goal than setting ourselves up for repeated failures by clinging to unrealistic targets and impractical visions.”

In the plummy world of alumni relations, where distinguished graduates are awarded honorary degrees and major donors are fêted at the president’s mansion, it is virtually unheard of for former students to set up shop as a political counterweight to the university, challenging its modes of governance and day-to-day operations

Alarmed by academia’s dominant ideological ethos of social justice activism – particularly the holy trinity of race, sex, and gender – more than two dozen dissident groups have emerged seeking to rebalance the culture at leading public and private universities across the country, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Williams, the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia.

They are expected to gain traction with Donald Trump back in the White House.

The dissident alumni organizations are not shoestring operations, but well-honed machines, some raising several hundred thousand dollars a year; a number of them have hired executive directors, professional staff, or consultants. This loose coalition of local chapters has also developed into a national movement with its own umbrella group, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

Drawing on alumni resources and connections, the dissidents have curated email lists totaling thousands of recipients, diverted financial contributions from longtime university donors, attracted financial support from foundations, organized speaker series and public events, and generated critical reports and investigative articles, especially regarding policies advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. They have invited prominent conservative and contrarian thinkers such as George Will, Nadine Strossen, Jonathan Haidt, Douglas Murray, and Heather Mac Donald to deliver on-campus talks.

The Virginia Military Institute alumni group, The Cadet Foundation, is the publisher of the independent student newspaper, The Cadet, and other chapters function as aggregators, muckrakers, and news services. The Jefferson Council,the University of Virginia alumni chapter, produces original articles almost daily of consistently high informational and entertainment value, and mostly written by a retired news editor and author.

“When you get down to it, these groups are news organizations, in a sense,” said Tom Rideout, a 1963 graduate of Washington & Lee University and a former American Banking Association president who co-founded one of the first alumni free speech associations, The Generals Redoubt, in response to the university’s move in 2018 to distance itself from its namesakes and their ties to slavery. “Essentially we’re in the communications business. Our job is to gather intelligence and distribute intelligence to supporters.”

It’s not possible to isolate the precise influence of these alumni from parallel pressure applied by Republican lawmakers, conservative trustees, and heterodox faculty, but college donations dipped nationwide last year in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent campus protests; donations at Harvard, Columbia, and Penn fell dramatically during this time amid rising alumni alarm.

For their part, the dissident alumni say they have helped bring about significant political gains, including:

• The resignation of Cornell president Martha Pollack, who was accused of prioritizing “DEI groupthink” that resulted in unruly campus protests and student harassment, prompting an investigation by the U.S. Education Department;
• Princeton’s president admonishing first-year students at freshman orientation last fall that it’s not the university’s job to “validate your opinions”;
• The University of Virginia suspending student-led campus tours that angry alumni said caricatured the legacy of Thomas Jefferson as nothing but slavery, rape, and theft of Indigenous land;
• The Virginia Press Association awarding its “top honor” to the Virginia Military Institute student newspaper, which is published by dissident alumni, for the student-journalists’ coverage of DEI controversies on campus.

Their operating expenses go to staff salaries, marketing expenses, speaker fees, and events, which can get disruptive. In some cases, the alumni chapters pay for their speakers’ private security or reimburse the university for campus security. UVA billed the Jefferson Council $7,847 for Abigail Shrier’s appearance in 2023 to discuss her book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Over two years, the Jefferson Council was billed about $47,000 for security expenses in connection with controversial speakers.

The newly arisen alumni free speech associations are just one facet of a major realignment in academia that signals that a half-century era of unchallenged progressive intellectual dominance may be coming to an end. Major university systems in red states have already ended DEI policies in hiring and scholarship, and more than 120 universities have adopted policies of institutional neutrality – the idea that the university exists to foster debate and criticism, not to take sides on public controversies.

Other organizations devoted to protecting academic freedom and viewpoint diversity – such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Heterodox Academy, and the Academic Freedom Alliance – have arisen to challenge the narrow academic consensus on social and political questions.

In parallel, heterodox faculty at leading universities have formed campus chapters, such as the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom, and kindred faculty groups at Yale, MIT, Columbia, and Duke. Last year, the University of Chicago announced an anonymous grant of $100 million to promote free speech values at the Chicago Forum for Free Speech and Expression. The Chicago Forum develops student orientation programming, supports research in academic freedom, and establishes fellowship programs for visiting scholars.

Over the same period, conservative donors, legislators, and trustees have launched more than a dozen academic civics centers that are reviving classical liberal education, rediscovering the Great Books, and rejecting what they perceive as the vilification of Western Civilization. These well-funded programs operate autonomously like law schools or engineering schools, with their own deans, Ph.D. programs, and sometimes dedicated buildings.

Trump’s Election a Boost

Trump’s election is expected to accelerate the reforms, particularly with his threat to cut federal funding to institutions that give weight to the racial identity and gender identity of students and faculty in admissions, hiring, teaching, and research.

In a January essay on the Princetonians for Free Speech site, group co-founder and current secretary and general counsel Edward Yingling, a former American Banking Association president, predicted that 2025 will be a breakthrough year for free speech on campus. The major precipitating event of this predicted turnaround, Yingling wrote, was the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 that led to unruly campus protests and encampments and the resignations of Ivy League presidents at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, all of which now have alumni free speech association chapters.

Some observers warn the anti-woke pushback will lead to an overcorrection. The legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group, predicted, according to the New York Times, the likelihood of increased attacks on the free speech rights of progressive students and professors, including investigations, punishment, and terminations. A recent weekend essay in the Wall Street Journal issued a similar warning, saying that the ravages of wokeness and cancel culture will come in the form of political payback: “They/them who sow the censorious winds should be prepared to one day reap the whirlwind.”

These transformations point to a looming question about the future prospects for the alumni free speech alliance chapters: Will these dissident alumni organizations be able to sustain momentum and continue attracting donations when it starts looking like wokeness is moribund and DEI is DOA?

When asked this question, not a single chapter representative hesitated to say that the fight will continue for years, possibly until the current generation of faculty and DEI hires reaches retirement age and can be replaced with a more balanced professoriate.

Carl Neuss, a California real-estate developer who co-founded the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, likened academia to a beautiful sailing ship infested with rats who are about to face an exterminator.

“It’ll be a battle royale,” Neuss said. “It’ll be a generation-long effort to get some balance back in the universities. They’re never going to reform themselves – the only way for it to occur is from outside pressure.”

James Bacon, a co-founder of The Jefferson Council and the chapter’s former executive director, expressed similar sentiments, characterizing the prevailing DEI value system among students, faculty, and administrators as “an entrenched orthodoxy.”

“It’s going to be a battle of a generation before we bring about substantial change,” Bacon said. “It’s going to be trench warfare, like the Battle of Verdun, fighting over inches.”

Retired federal prosecutor John Bruce, a board member of the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill’s alumni free speech association, concurs. “We see ourselves as permanent,” Bruce said. “There is a danger that people will think that the battle has been won. But the Left is relentless.”

Although the formal missions of these alumni chapters include specific proposals to promote free speech and viewpoint diversity, their ambitions are much broader: to change the intellectual climate of academia, revive classical liberal education, and curb the social justice activism that has pervaded academia for years.

Some of the dissident groups – including chapters at UVA, Washington & Lee, Cornell, and Princeton – have been active in opposing campus efforts to  rename buildings and remove statues, plaques, and commemorations that are said to glamorize white supremacy or make African American students feel excluded.

The Washington & Lee University alumni who formed The Generals Redoubt include among their stated goals the re-establishment of public prayer. The group defends the character of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and promotes a book, “Un-Cancel Robert E. Lee: An Open Letter to The Trustees of Washington and Lee University,” written by member Gib Kerr and published by the conservative imprint, Bombardier Books.

These alumni were furious that W&L removed Lee’s name from the campus chapel, sealed off Lee’s recumbent statue from public view, and removed the likenesses of George Washington and Robert E. Lee from diplomas awarded to graduating students.

The Generals Redoubt is one of the most successful alumni chapters, raising $2 million in each of the past two years, according to the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer database, and spending $1 million to purchase a historic property to serve as the organization’s headquarters and venue site.

Among those that have taken on the cause of historic preservation, The Jefferson Council’s formal mission involves preserving “the beauty of The Lawn” – the terraced greensward and courtyard at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s academic village that is listed on the Virginia Historic Register, the National Historic Register and among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites – from political signs that the chapter deems vulgar and offensive.

The Jefferson Council was provoked in 2020 by a student occupant of one of the storied 19^th-century rooms on The Lawn who posted on the door: “F— UVA,” followed by a string of accusations: “UVA operating cost, KKKops, genocide, slavery, disability, Black+Brown life.”

Noting that the profanity was “disheartening,” the university nevertheless supported the student’s free speech rights in this instance. UVA’s decision was publicly praised by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “illustrating why UVA is one of the relatively few institutions in the country to earn FIRE’s highest, ‘green light’ rating.”

The Jefferson Council was galvanized by UVA’s “Racial Equity Task Force” report in 2020 that recommended $950 million in DEI-related and antiracist-oriented investments, leading to the removal of a statue of George Rogers Clark (a subjugator of indigenous tribes), the renaming of the main campus library, and the promised – but as-of-yet not realized – “contextualization” of the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the iconic Rotunda, designed by Jefferson himself and modeled on the Roman Pantheon.

The Jefferson Council has filed more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests to pry loose details on a range of issues, including details about UVA’s decision-making on recent name changes of campus buildings and past and potential yet-unannounced future statue removals. A faculty petition has declared The Jefferson Council to pose a threat to academic freedom.

“We are widely detested,” said Bacon, one of the co-founders and principal writers for The Jefferson Council.

In a 2023 New York Times article about the alumni group, UVA President James Ryan expressed his doubts about The Jefferson Council’s real motives: “Whether this is an effort to focus on the aspects of D.E.I. that seem to threaten academic freedom and push toward ideological conformity, or whether it’s an effort to turn back the clock to 1965 – it’s hard to know.”

Despite the official snub – or perhaps because of it – The Jefferson Council raised a healthy $260,000 in 2023, down from $557,044 the previous year. The group communicates with 3,200 members and has about 850 active donors, said co-founder Thomas Neale, a corporate finance professional who is also chairman of the national Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

What rankles Neale and other alumni is what they see as a blatant double standard that trumpets free speech rights for woke obscenities on a UNESCO World Heritage site but cites the harms of misgendering and microaggressions when the insult goes the other way.

The dissident alumni have established a base of support among like-minded students and faculty on their respective campuses, but they have also made enemies along the way.

Robert Morris Jr., the founder and president of VMI’s dissident alumni group, The Cadet Foundation, has been banned for life from the university’s official alumni association in connection with accessing the alumni email database to recruit alumni to the dissident group, and a number of other alumni were handed 10-year suspensions for their involvement.

Bert Ellis, a University of Virginia trustee and co-founder of The Jefferson Council, was censured by UVA’s Faculty Senate for allegedly planning to vandalize the student’s “F— UVA” sign; Ellis was also the target of an unsuccessful effort by Democrats in the Virginia statehouse to block his appointment to UVA’s board of visitors.

A ‘Monster List’ of Supporters

According to The Cornell Daily Sun, then-President Martha Pollack said in 2023 – a year before she was forced to resign – that it was “incredibly frustrating” that groups like the Cornell Free Speech Alliance denounce DEI “in the guise” of defending free speech.

The Cornell group has proven to be one of the most active and effective chapters, one born out of a university fundraising appeal gone bad.

In 2019, Cornell officials courted Neuss, a 1976 engineering grad and successful real-estate tycoon, with an invitation to make a substantial gift – “north of $1 million,” in Neuss’s words – in exchange for a naming opportunity involving a university building, possibly a library or a laboratory. Neuss had heard rumors about intolerance and censorship on campus and delayed cutting the check as he mulled his options. In a bid to appease his concerns, university officials introduced him to political moderates on the faculty. After hearing their testimonies, Neuss resolved to use his donations to create the Cornell Free Speech Alliance in 2021.

“What he learned from these faculty members was astonishing,” the Cornell Alliance memorialized in one of its numerous reports. “They told him that they felt sidelined and humiliated by the diversity training they were required to attend and were perpetually afraid they would say something factual but impolitic that could negatively impact their job.”

The alumni organization began compiling an email distribution from various sources – web searches, references, word of mouth, unsolicited inquiries – and now communicates regularly with 23,000 regular readers and subscribers. Like other alumni groups, Cornell tapped into the university’s official alumni association contacts list – extracting thousands of emails – before Cornell shut down unlimited access. The Cornell Free Speech Alliance now disseminates news updates and other information reporting on the Cornell administration and exposing practices the group considers abusive or even illegal.

“This is one thing that absolutely freaks them out,” Neuss said. “We have compiled this monster email list of Cornell alumni, donors, trustees, former trustees, et cetera.”

A report issued in December 2023 lists a number of early achievements: creating a free speech “action plan” for Cornell leadership; media exposure in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, New York Post, Inside Higher Ed, National Review and RealClearPolitics; and filing an amicus brief with other alumni free speech alliance chapters in a Supreme Court case involving alleged free speech abridgments at Virginia Tech University.

Neuss said the organization has close to 1,000 donors. As of 2023, the group reported $221,000 in revenue and total assets of $186,000, according to the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer database. It is run by an executive committee of eight Cornell alums and two dozen other volunteers, and paid professionals include an email blast specialist and a PR/communications point person.

One of the culture war controversies that drew the group’s ire was the mysterious disappearance of a bust of Abraham Lincoln that had been displayed at the Rare and Manuscript Collections section of Kroch Library, which houses the university’s Asia Collections and rare books,  manuscripts and other artifacts. A professor learned from a librarian that the bust had been removed because of a “complaint.” The bust was eventually restored after the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, The College Fix, and others drew attention to its disappearance, and concerned alumni flooded the administration with angry letters.

This was at the height of the so-called racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, prompting Cornell President Pollack to announce what was cast as a series of antiracist actions: a mandatory unit on racism, bias, and equity for all Cornell students; the creation of an Anti-Racism Center to generate antiracism scholarship; and a campus-wide, racism-focused semester, during which “our campus community will focus on issues of racism in the U.S. through relevant readings and discussions.”

In January 2024, Cornell trustee and donor Jon Lindseth wrote an open letter to Cornell trustees calling for President Pollack’s resignation, enumerating a litany of complaints, starting with Pollack’s “shameful,” milquetoast response to “terrorism and antisemitism,” compared to her swift, decisive action in response to the George Floyd tragedy.

“A new campus ‘bias reporting system’ fosters a hostile Orwellian environment among neighbors, classmates, and colleagues reporting on one another,” Lindseth wrote. “The elimination of grades and SATs has created a system in which equal outcomes rather than proven merit has become the objective.”

Many of the examples in Lindseth’s letter, such as “whistleblower accounts” from faculty, are attributed to the muckraking work of the Cornell Free Speech Alliance. “Instances are reported of qualified candidates for faculty positions being rejected for their DEI statements alone,” Lindseth wrote.

“Even Lincoln could be canceled under the present administration,” Lindseth lamented. “This is an absolute disgrace.”

Less than four months later, Pollack was out.

Two weeks later, the alumni alliance released a whistleblower report headlined: “Internal Cornell Records Provided To CFSA Show How The University Discriminates Based On Personal Beliefs & Identity Profiles Rather Than Merit.” The report warned that Cornell was illegally disqualifying job candidates based on DEI statements and based on their identity characteristics.

In August, the group submitted an incriminating 101-page report to Cornell leaders and trustees, noting that Cornell ranks 188^th out of 203 American universities in free expression, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, whose surveys indicate that 88% of Cornell’s students self-censor their speech on campus.

The report urged Cornell leaders to get out of the business of social justice activism: “Concerns of ‘community,’ ‘belonging,’ ‘microaggressions,’ and related efforts to ‘protect students from harmful ideas’ must be clearly and emphatically subordinated to the essential principles of open inquiry, academic freedom, free expression, and viewpoint diversity.”

“We’re dealing with institutions that are steeped in the oppressor-oppressed ideology,” said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a national advocacy group that helped spin off the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. “Alumni and donors are now fed up with the idea of being tapped smoothly for money but essentially being pushed aside when they want to talk about the values of the campus.”

There long have been legitimate concerns when Americans travel to restrictive nations – those that don’t accept the multitude of rights Americans enjoy – such as North Korea. Or China. Or even Islamic regimes like Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

Now, the American Center for Law and Justice is warning about travel to the United Kingdom.

The legal organization has posted online an analysis of the threat the UK’s ideological leftism now poses.

“The UK has declared that it will charge and prosecute Americans for their social media posts, written while still in America, if they travel to its borders. The ACLJ has prepared a legal memo detailing the specific laws at play and the danger for Americans. Specifically, it details how your speech on the internet could violate the UK’s broad ‘hate speech’ laws and how you could be arrested as soon as you step foot in the UK for your posts back home,” the ACLJ reports.

“If an American speaks in the United States in a way that UK officials construe as affecting their national interest or even producing substantial effects within the country, even if it’s just a statement about your Christian faith or your political stance, then you could be arrested upon entry to the UK,” it warned.

This of course, would be entry to the nation famed worldwide for the Constitution-inspiring Magna Carta.

The document, from 1215 A.D., is considered one of the premier listings of rights for citizens, church rights, impartial justice and more.

“UK officials have boasted how proud they are of this initiative: The UK’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, said in a press conference, ‘We will throw the full force of the law at people. . . . And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,’” the ACLJ warning noted.

Adding to the threat was Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder whether directly or those whipping up this action online.”

The ACLJ warned it “clearly” is conservatives who are being targeted.

And, forebodingly, what qualifies as illegal speech actually is “at the whim of the police and officials, as the laws themselves are too vague to define specific violations.”

For example, one law criminalizes “threatening, abusive or insulting words” and another targets “grossly offensive” messaging.

Be further warned, travelers are told, that European courts regularly affirm the validity of such directed attacks on conservatives and their speech.

And going into the “absurd,” the ACLJ warns, some UK leaders actually have wanted to extradite individuals from the U.S. whose language they insist be suppressed.