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Judge Orders Trump Admin To Disburse $12 Million In Funding To Radio Free Europe

A federal judge ruled on April 29 that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) must disburse the funding appropriated by Congress to the nonprofit news organization Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a temporary restraining order sought by the media group, directing USAGM to immediately disburse over $12 million in funding for the month of April to Radio Free Europe.

Lamberth said the plaintiff had shown it would suffer irreparable harm absent a restraining order, noting that USAGM’s actions to terminate the grants agreement “threaten the very existence” of the group.

The judge also stated that Radio Free Europe is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that USAGM had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by terminating the grants agreement.

Lamberth said the Trump administration must seek congressional approval to take such action, noting that it “has no residual constitutional power to refuse” to spend appropriations by Congress.

“It is, after all, Congress that makes the laws in this country. In this case, for example, it was Congress who ordained that the monies at issue should be allocated to RFE/RL,” Lamberth stated, referring to the acronym for Radio Free Europe.

The judge also determined that USAGM’s decision to change the grant agreement after the start of the fiscal year was “arbitrary and capricious.”

According to the court order, USAGM presented “a radically different grant agreement” in mid-April, leaving little time for a meaningful negotiation as Radio Free Europe was running out of funding.

“If our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our Founders,” Lamberth stated.

USAGM moved to terminate Radio Free Europe’s grant agreement following President Donald Trump’s order directing officials to eliminate non-statutory components of the agency. USAGM has an annual budget of around $900 million and operates networks broadcasting in more than 60 languages and around 100 countries.

The cutbacks affect the organizations and agencies under its umbrella, including Voice of America (VOA); the Office of Cuba Broadcasting; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other organizations such as Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

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Making Sense of Trump’s Tariffs

Trump’s entire political history is a cautionary tale against confusing elite and media fury for heartland sentiment. A certain strategic coherence and a common tactic unite Trump’s domestic and foreign policies in pursuit of the overarching goal of making America great again. The bigger concern is not that there’s no method to his apparent madness, but that the implementation of his ambitious national and international agenda could be imperilled by incompetence and bumbling, as with the amateurish use of Signal chat groups for highly sensitive discussions.

There are three components to each of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies that he is pursuing with a sense of urgency with wounds still raw from how the DC swamp-dwellers derailed his first term. Domestically, he is dismantling Net Zero, DEI and gender self-ID policies that have imposed exorbitant tax, regulatory and compliance costs on American consumers, producers and institutions. They have also deepened identitarian divisions and conflicts that threaten to destroy social cohesion and unleash an orgy of national self-abasement. Internationally, he wants to step back from forever wars that have taken a heavy toll on American blood and treasure, distribute the burden of defending Western interests and values more equitably among allies – J.D. Vance is surely right to say that being a ‘permanent security vassal’ of the US is neither in its nor their interest – and reverse the decades-long drift into globalisation and globalism that have deindustrialised America and ‘Gulliverised’ its freedom of action in world affairs with normative restraints. Mass immigration is a seventh on-border pathology that straddles domestic and foreign policy. Between them, the suite of domestic and international policies will, he believes, restore national pride and identity, stop America being ripped off by security and trade partners, re-shore manufacturing capacity and re-establish America as the word’s most powerful industrial and military power.

This is where the paradigm-shifting tariffs come in. Benjamin Brewster is credited with having written in the Yale Literary Magazine way back in February 1882 that “in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is”. In orthodox economic theory, free trade and globalisation create winners all round. In practice, they’ve created winners and losers, widening inequality both within and among nations. ‘Free’ trade has rewarded ‘everywhere’ elites even while its prescriptions have immiserated the ‘nowhere’ folks and denuded America’s manufacturing strengths. The inequitable distribution of the burdens of globalisation has shredded the social contracts between governments and citizens. People are citizens of nations, not of economies. Nationalism requires the prioritisation of citizens over business. Policies that enrich Chinese while impoverishing Americans, that make China stronger while hollowing out America’s industrial-cum-military might, are the antithesis of this foundational social compact.

Trump’s instinct may well be right that globalisation had shifted the trading balance to America’s net disadvantage and the new equilibrium that eventually settles after his rupture of the existing world trading order will reposition the US to recover lost ground. The WTO, for example, has proven to be not fit for purpose in enforcing fair-trade rules on a predatory non-market economy of China’s size and a mercantilist bloc like the EU. Time will tell if the punitive tariffs are a ‘shock and awe’ negotiating tactic to recalibrate the trading order or an attempt to compel trading partners to capitulate to arbitrary US demands. Trump is taking an audacious gamble that efforts by others to threaten American financial primacy as they de-risk from the US by diversifying to other markets and suppliers will quickly run into hard limits. Besides, how many countries will, if pushed to the choice, opt for long-term strategic dependence on China rather than the US? Will we? The scramble for bilateral deals with Washington, by countries that hold weaker trade cards than the US and are rushing to placate Trump, may prove a harbinger. For example, hit with 18% tariffs, Zimbabwe has suspended tariffs on US goods in order to build a ‘positive relationship’ with the Trump Administration. And the administration has worked the miracle of converting British PM Keir Starmer into a champion of free speech and increased defence spending while cutting health and foreign aid spending.

Michael Pettis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in Foreign Affairs on April 21st, notes that the world trading order became increasingly cumbersome as countries externalised domestic economic imbalances into trading imbalances through a complex maze of tariffs, non-tariff barriers and subsidies. Trump’s policies aim at the transformation of this global trade and capital regime that subordinated the needs of individual economies to the demands of the global system. A new equilibrium of individual and global needs could result in better-balanced economic growth, higher wages and trade parity.

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Fake News Has No Shame: “60 Minutes” Picks Up 13 Emmy Nominations Including Segment Where They Selectively Edited and Spliced their Kamala Harris Interview before Election

Fomer CNN star Brian Stelter announced Thursday on X that “60 Minutes” picked up 13 Emmy nominations this year for their junk reporting.

The Emmy’s even nominated the infamous Kamala Harris interview they selectively edited and spliced sentences together to make her sound like a normal human. It as quite a piece of work.

It was completely fake. But that didn’t stop the Emmy’s from nominating their fake news segment in the television news and documentary category.

In the runup to the 2024 election, Fake news 60 Minutes was caught editing Kamala’s answers to make her sound coherent and normal.

it was so bad that ’60 Minutes’ spliced her nonsensical answer and replaced it with a completely separate sentence she said earlier in the interview.

Mixing and matching questions and answers. This isn’t journalism. It’s fraud.

Here is a sampling of the fake news they pushed on Americans.

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Digital ID is a danger to us all

Few things stir the imagination of conspiracy theorists like the prospect of a government-backed digital-identity scheme. The obsessive advocacy of digital ID by Tony Blair of all people is just more grist to their mill. But there are perfectly rational reasons to be wary of the British state’s digital-ID scheme. For one thing, it will make us less safe.

As I recently reported in the Telegraph, I was contacted by a senior civil servant working on One Login, the UK’s digital-identity project. Announced in 2021 and developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS), One Login has absorbed over £300million in public funds so far. It is ultimately designed to help citizens access hundreds of government services and, in the shape of the gov.uk wallet, retain digital documents including an individual’s driving licence. It currently processes the sensitive personal and biometric data for three million citizens, but that number is expected to rise as the service expands.

What the senior civil servant told me was disturbing. He arrived on the project in 2022 to set up an information-assurance team, which performs a function similar to that of an auditor, assessing risk. At One Login, he found a chaotic and insecure work culture. The system was being accessed by users with ‘do anything’ system-administrator privileges thousands of times a month. Many of these users did not have the recommended security-clearance level required to work with the sensitive personal data of millions of citizens. Moreover, the GDS did not mandate locked-down workstations for staff working from home, or for the hundreds of contractors developing the system – a legacy of the GDS’s ‘geeks in jeans’ culture once eulogised by commentators. The civil servant also discovered that part of the system was being developed in Romania, a nation named by Oxford University researchers as one of the world’s ‘key cyber-crime hotspots’.

It would only take one developer with the right administrator privileges to create havoc on the system, perhaps developing ‘back doors’ into One Login that no one would even be aware of.

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Trump DOJ Suing Blue States Over Unconstitutional Climate Laws That Threaten U.S. Energy Security

The Trump Justice Department is suing multiple blue states over ridiculous progressive climate laws that they claim are unconstitutional and which threaten United States energy security.

Returning the country to a state of energy independence was one of the pillars of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. It’s extremely important and not just to our economy. Energy independence is a national security issue.

The left wants to destroy the fossil fuel industry and they’ve been quite open about that. Yet as we just saw in Spain, using only green and renewable energy sources doesn’t work.

FOX News reports:

DOJ sues four blue states over ‘unconstitutional’ climate laws threatening US energy security

The Justice Department (DOJ) has filed lawsuits against four Democrat-led states: Hawaii, Michigan, New York and Vermont, over what it calls unconstitutional climate policies that threaten U.S. energy independence and national security.

The move follows President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14260, Protecting American Energy from State Overreach, directing federal action against state laws that burden domestic energy development.

“These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi…

The DOJ filed complaints Tuesday against New York and Vermont over newly passed “climate superfund” laws, which would impose strict liability on fossil fuel companies for alleged contributions to climate change.

New York’s law alone seeks $75 billion in damages from energy firms. According to the DOJ, these laws are preempted by the federal Clean Air Act, violate the Constitution, and infringe on federal foreign affairs powers.

This is absolutely necessary. When the power goes out, all bets are off.

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Report: FBI Agent Elvis Chan, Key Figure in 2020 Election Censorship Scheme, Placed on Terminal Leave

FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan, one of the central figures in the federal government’s censorship of conservative voices during the 2020 presidential election, has reportedly been placed on terminal leave.

The development was first reported by independent journalist Breanna Morello.

Chan, who served as the FBI’s key liaison between the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and Big Tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, was instrumental in a government-led censorship campaign to silence conservative voices and suppress damaging information about Hunter Biden in the lead-up to the election.

Morello, citing sources familiar with Chan’s situation, reports that the longtime San Francisco-based agent has not accessed any of his government devices for over a month.

Chan still lists himself as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge on his LinkedIn page, which includes preferred pronouns — “he/him.”

The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit against FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan last year for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena tied to the 2020 election censorship scandal.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, lays out damning allegations: that Chan, acting as the FBI’s liaison with Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter, played a central role in the federal government’s backdoor scheme to censor Americans online before the 2020 presidential election.

Despite being subpoenaed by Congress to testify, Chan—under orders from Biden’s Department of Justice—refused to appear. Why? Because Congress wouldn’t allow DOJ lawyers to sit in and monitor the interview. Yes, the DOJ wants to babysit its agents during congressional investigations, undermining the House’s constitutional oversight authority.

According to the complaint, Chan was a “pivotal figure” passing information from the FBI to social media companies in the months leading up to the election—information that often led to the silencing of viewpoints inconvenient to the ruling regime.

According to Morello, Chan also testified in the landmark case Missouri v. Biden—a case in which I, Jim Hoft, am a plaintiff—where he conveniently claimed to have “no internal knowledge” of the FBI’s role in pressuring tech companies to censor the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story.

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Tulsi Gabbard Reveals The Reason Anthony Fauci Sought a Preemptive Pardon from Joe Biden – Wicked Doctor Could Now Face Federal Perjury Charges

DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Tulsi Gabbard dropped a bombshell during an interview this week with Megyn Kelly, and former NIH Director Anthony Fauci should be worried.

Gabbard appeared with Kelly to discuss a variety of issues on investigating leaks from within the administration, whether she would run for president (she did not rule it out), and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the issue regarding COVID-19 came up, Gabbard had plenty of interesting news to share.

Gabbard told Kelly that she, along with others, were investigating whether the United States funded gain-of-function research which caused the COVID-19 pandemic. This would mean U.S. taxpayer dollars courtesy of Fauci fueled the worst health crisis in over 100 years.

“The thing we are working with Jay Bhattacharya (NIH Director) on, as well as Secretary (Robert) Kennedy, is looking at the gain of function research that in the case of the Wuhan Lab, as well as many others,” Gabbard said. Many of these biolabs around the world were actually US-funded and led to this dangerous kind of research that, in many examples, has resulted in either a pandemic or some other major health crisis.”

“If it was Peter Daszak’s research with the Wuhan bat lady that caused this pandemic, then we did fund it, Anthony Fauci did fund it,” Kelly said.

Gabbard then revealed this was exactly why Fauci sought a pardon from Joe Biden (who of course granted it), especially since he was previously caught under oath lying to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) about his role in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The thing that he denied over and over to Senator Rand Paul’s questioning under oath,” Gabbard responded. “Is it any wonder why he sought a preemptive pardon for ANYTHING, during a certain period of time, from President Biden before he left office.”

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Trump terminates NPR, PBS federal funding with sweeping executive order

President Trump signed an executive order late Thursday terminating federal funding for National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

NPR and PBS, which have long been targeted for cuts by conservatives, both receive partial funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which the president argued is unnecessary in the current media environment.

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” Trump wrote in the order.

“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage,” he added. “The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

Trump further directed the CPB to end indirect funding to NPR and PBS, including by “ensuring that licensees and permittees of public radio and television stations, as well as any other recipients of CPB funds, do not use Federal funds for NPR and PBS.” 

The president gave the CPB until June 30 to effectuate his directive. 

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German Secret Police Labels AfD “Confirmed Far Right” as AfD Takes the Lead in the Polls

The German secret political police have designated the most popular German political party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) as “confirmed far-right”, a legally undefined category that will make it hard for civil servants, cops and teachers to keep their jobs and be AfD members. Nevertheless the AfD continues to surge in the polls, now leading the RINO Christian Democrats by 2%, 26% over 24%.

Germany is the only Western country where the domestic intel agency holds press conferences and issues press releases defaming the largest opposition party as “far-right”.

In a presse release dated May 2, 2025, the German secret political police stated that “today, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has classified the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD)  as “confirmed far-right”, due to the extremist nature of the party as a whole and its disregard for human dignity.”

The decision was based on a 1,100 page brief compiled by the secret political police, Der Spiegel magazine reported, which has not been released to the public.

The BfV believes the AfD pursues an “ethnonationalist agenda” which goes against Germany’s “free democratic principles.”

Critics such as US Vice President JD Vance have countered that German censorship and arrests of political critics are a much greater danger to freedom and democracy.

The BfV charged that the AfD “aims to exclude certain segments of the population from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional, unequal treatment and thus illegally discriminate against them. Specifically, the AfD does not consider German nationals with a migration history from Muslim countries as equal members of a German people, which is defined ethnically.”

The AfD actually has many members from Muslim countries, such as Kurdish women’s activist Leyla Bilge or Albanian-German politician Enxhi Seli-Zacharias. Pakistani YouTuber Feroz Khan or Serb ex-Muslim Irfan Peci are also prominent AfD supporters. Many members of the “Jews in the AfD” are from Muslim ex-Soviet Republics, where life became increasingly difficult for Jews after independence.

What the BfV seems to mean here is that the AfD does not have many Muslim supporters, but even that has begun to change since the AfD is the only party in Germany to oppose gender ideology in schools and transing of kids, which most Muslims also vehemently reject.

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Sick: The Child Prostitution Fight That’s Tearing California Democrats Apart

There’s a mind-blowing battle playing out in Sacramento among the Democrats who dominate California politics.  We told you this week about how these same Democrats quietly killed a bipartisan bill, without debate, that would have implemented the successful reading instruction program that has allowed Mississippi students to overtake California kids in early literacy.  They did so at the furious behest of California’s anti-education, anti-child teachers unions, who are among the deep-pocketed left-wing special interest groups who rule the party that rules the state.  This maneuver even offended the leftist editors of the leftist San Francisco Chronicle, but it’s business as usual in the leftist state.  If that weren’t bad enough, Democrats have chosen to double down on cartoonish evil — and I don’t use that word lightly — by debating over whether purchasing children for sex should be a felony.

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