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September 2024

Liz Peek: 10 critical priorities for Trump’s first day back in the White House

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4901314-trump-second-term-priorities

Donald Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity last year that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except on Day One.” On that first day back in office, he said, “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”

It was clear what he meant — and he even added, “After that, I’m not a dictator” — but liberals across the country at least feigned outrage over such “authoritarian” comments.  

They conveniently ignore the whirling dervish nature of Joe Biden’s earlyWhite House days.

Biden, of course, unilaterally canceled the Keystone Pipeline; dictated masks be worn on federal property (and on planes and trains); moved to rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords; froze student debt collections; set stricter emissions limits for vehicles; suspended oil drilling leasing on federal lands; terminated Trump’s 1776 Commission; revoked Trump’s efforts to exclude illegal immigrants from the U.S. Census; reinforced the protections for illegal migrants brought to the U.S. as children; abolished the ban on travel to the U.S. from (at that point) 11 countries with serious terrorism problems (the so-called “Muslim ban”); paused deportations of people in the U.S. illegally; stopped building the border wall; banned workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender employees; restored collective bargaining power and workplace protections for federal workers; undid Trump’s regulatory approval process; and approved a whole slew of measures addressing the COVID pandemic. 

This day of unilateral power was of course celebrated by the media, which cheered Biden’s efforts to undo pretty much everything his predecessor had done, including closing our southern border.   

So if Trump is reelected, what should be his top priorities for his first 100 days?  Here are 10 of them:

The Guilt of Intellectuals By Roger Kimball

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-guilt-of-intellectuals/

Let the Hosannas ring forth: Fredric Jameson, one of the world’s most owlish producers of reader-proof prose of a Marxian bent, has just shuffled off his mortal coil, age 90.  The New York Times was quick off the mark with a fawning obituary. Duke University, where Jameson emitted his signature brand of academic “anti-capitalist” fog for many years, actually lowered the campus flags to commemorate the passing of this maven of Marxist muddle. (I put editorial quotation marks around “anti-capitalist” because, like so many of his academic brethren, Jameson railed against capitalism, “bourgeois individualism,” etc., while eagerly lapping up their benefits.) 

I last thought about Jameson in the 1990s when I wrote an essay about him for The New Criterion. I thought it might be worth reprising, with a few alterations, now that he has gone to his worker’s paradise. 

I began with an epigraph from the master himself: 

It is rather the essential “innocence” of intellectuals which is here in question: this private inner game of theoretical “convictions” and polemics against imaginary conceptual antagonists and mythic counterpositions, … of passionate private languages and private religions, which, entering the field of force of the real social world, take on a murderous and wholly unsuspected power.

—Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression

Among the stars that twinkled in the academic firmament of the 1990s and after, none twinkled more formidably than the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. Having taught at Harvard, Yale, and at various campuses of the University of California, Professor Jameson, who died on September 20, was for many years ensconced at Duke University — that favored perch for so many academic twinklers — where he was William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of both the Graduate Program in Literature and the Duke Center for Critical Theory.