In Joe Biden’s spate of last-minute commutations, one particularly disgraceful episode stands out. Biden actually granted clemency to a drug lord who murdered an eight-year-old boy and his mother to prevent them from testifying against him.

They’re saying it was an accident. Biden signed pardons for “non-violent drug offenders” at the request of the ACLU. Biden’s staff reportedly didn’t double-check the ACLU’s list.

This is a scandal. But it also highlights a greater emerging scandal: America was running on autopilot for four long years. The result was misguided progressive policy, sloppiness and a lack of accountability that wreaked havoc on our country.

The truth about the Biden years will emerge, as truth always does over time. And Americans will be horrified -- both at the fraud itself and by a complicit media that knew the truth and failed to tell it.

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Donald Trump is barely over a week into his presidency and is taking flak from the commentariat that his statements about Egypt and Jordan taking in displaced Arabs from Gaza and about releasing arms to Israel it paid for.

Some have claimed he’s pouring fuel on the fires of the wars he was expected to quell. This is all wrong. When Trump put maximum pressure on Iran and made clear the US would stand with Israel in his first term, there was peace. It was Biden’s presidency that gave militancy its gas and a green light—by softening on and enriching Iran, by expressing weakness toward Russia, through callousness toward Americans being killed in Afghanistan and allowing the Taliban to take it over and—finally—by sending mixed messages regarding the US and our relationship with Israel.

Strongly siding with allies (like Israel), and pressuring those who have long lived in the shadows of safe harbors for militancy (like Egypt and Jordan), is a big difference from the last four years—and it was the last four years that brought war.

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Every president describes their first days in office as historic. Donald Trump has a legitimate claim, and not just for being the second former president to return in a non-consecutive term. Trump prepared well to transform the federal government, and in doing so reset the Overton Window of possibilities. Or did he?

In one of his boldest actions, Trump reversed a sixty-year-old executive order by Lyndon Baines Johnson to end affirmative action in all phases of the federal government. Trump had pledged to end DEI and restore merit as the sole value in hiring, but few predicted this move—or had even debated it.

Some observers were shocked at the drastic action, but they shouldn’t be surprised. Americans had long ago concluded that the policy had at best outlived any usefulness it had, and more opposed it now than ever before. Trump didn’t shift the Overton Window of debate; he defeated the Democrats who refused to recognize that the window had already shifted.

That’s a hard lesson on the danger of staying in an Academia bubble.

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