The corruption of global institutions has, in turn, led to significant opposition that is becoming apparent. There is the prospect of an incoming Trump administration that is avowedly skeptical of the claims of an alleged climate crisis and is intent on exiting the U.N.’s Paris Agreement and its “net zero by 2050” policy target for a second time. This presents a welcome challenge to these corrupt institutions. Will President Donald Trump and some of the populist parties in Europe be capable of countering the entrenched globalist climate agenda?

The World Bank

On Oct. 17, Oxfam published a report that shockingly found that up to $41 billion in World Bank climate finance—nearly 40% of all climate funds disbursed by the World Bank over the past seven years—is “unaccounted for between the time projects were approved and when they closed.” In other words, no one knows how the money was used. There is no paper trail revealing where the money went or what the accomplished results were.

Green cronyism, ranging from the Solyndra debacle—the waste of almost half a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on a failed solar farm project under President Barack Obama’s watch—to President Joe Biden’s duplicitously-named Inflation Reduction Act, which will unleash an estimated $1 trillion deluge of subsidies on favored “green” industries, is nothing new. But it is instructive to trace the World Bank’s decline from its honorable founding objectives to its current status as yet another institution advocating green causes.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, reflecting the progressive virtues of Obama, who appointed him as president of the World Bank in 2012, imposed a ban on the financing of coal-fired power stations in 2013. This was followed by a ban on investments in all new upstream oil and gas resource development projects. […]

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Conservatives had wondered if Trump would oppose Johnson’s bid after the president-elect effectively killed the first massive spending bill to fund the government earlier this month.

“We are the Party of COMMON SENSE, a primary reason that we WON, in a landslide, the magnificent and historic Presidential Election of 2024,” Trump began in a post on Truth Social.

The president-elect celebrated the fact that he won every swing state, 312 Electoral College votes, and more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

“LETS NOT BLOW THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY WHICH WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN,” Trump added. “The American people need IMMEDIATE relief from all of the destructive policies of the last Administration. Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” […]

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“This is going against the rule of law and against the will of the American people” who elected Trump, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Allison Huynh says of Newsom’s plans.

Democrats in California have “romanticized” sanctuary cities, illegal aliens, and even crime, says Huynh, a former Obama fundraiser and Democrat.

“We’re just opening the gate and allowing all these illegal immigrants to come in, a lot of criminals, drug dealers, and it’s all funded by George Soros and the cartels,” she says, referring to the Hungarian-American investor, liberal political activist, and donor.

Soros-financed candidates for district attorney, considered soft on crime, have won election in cities in California and other states. […]

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“It appears that even in the waning days of the Biden administration, your agencies will remain defiant in providing the public with complete information about the COVID-19 vaccines,” writes Johnson, incoming chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Select Subcommittee on Investigations, in the Dec. 5 letter shared with The Daily Signal.

“If it becomes necessary to subpoena these and other requested records in the next Congress when I become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I will do so,” the Wisconsin Republican adds.

Johnson’s letter went to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra; Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf; and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Mandy Cohen. (CDC and FDA are agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services.)

All three public health officials likely will be replaced shortly after President-elect Donald Trump takes office. […]

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“The provider must commit to establishing an environment that supports the child’s LGBTQI+ status or identity,” according to the rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The policy, says Herbie Newell, president and executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, “made people of faith into a different category of foster and adoptive parent, saying that because they didn’t give in to this pro-radical LGBTQ+ agenda, that they couldn’t foster any child with gender dysphoria or any child that might be having any questions about their LGBTQ status.”

“Faith-based Christian people were put on the sidelines and not able to participate in our foster care and adoption system in the same way,” Newell says.

With over 350,000 children in the U.S. foster care system and over 100,000 of them waiting to be adopted, Newell says, he is hopeful that the incoming Trump administration will roll back such “oppressive administrative rulings.” […]

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The Ph.D. sociologist who uncovered this connection argues for universal school choice, especially programs that enable parents to direct the education funds for their students to religious schools, in order to preserve the self-control that accompanies religious observance, according to his research.

“If the parents want to choose religious schools and want to preserve the religious faith of their children, well, my research indicates that’s going to be very good for everyone,” Philip Truscott told The Daily Signal in a Zoom interview Tuesday. A sociologist who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey in England, Truscott taught as a professor of sociology at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, for 10 years, ending in July.

If religion makes a comeback, “everybody’s less likely to be a rape victim, everybody will have less need for public expenditure on mental health, because for every completed suicide, you get like 10 that are attempted suicides,” he said.

Rape and Religion

The academic journal Journal of Sociology and Christianity published Truscott’s abstract “Rape, Suicide, and the Rise of Religious Nones,” in its fall 2024 edition. […]

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The results are in, and on Nov. 5, Americans officially rejected the high prices and spiraling costs that defined much of the Biden-Harris administration—including the least affordable housing market in U.S. history.

Rather than being chastened by the national shellacking he, his vice president, and his party received, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is pursuing an audacious move that could throw the housing market into disarray and put homeownership even further out of reach for middle-class Americans.

In a high-profile lawsuit filed last month, the DOJ is seeking to crack down on a case of alleged home-appraisal bias in Colorado, but the lawsuit could set a worrisome new precedent for the relationship between mortgage lenders and appraisers. The consequences could be sweeping, and they may weigh most heavily on the black homeowners and aspiring homeowners who the DOJ is ironically trying to protect with this lawsuit.

The DOJ is alleging that an appraiser, Maksym Mykhailyna, undervalued a black woman’s Denver home while she was applying for a refinance. Undervaluation typically results in a higher interest rate and a lower loan amount.

The Biden administration has made cracking down on this kind of alleged discrimination a focus, and Vice President Kamala Harris has led the White House’s efforts. Yet, the DOJ’s case hardly proves the appraiser undervalued the home. Even more importantly, the DOJ fails to show that unlawful racial bias skewed the appraisal results or that this singular incident is indicative of systemic discrimination permeating the appraisal industry.

These crackdowns over an illusory problem have been repeatedly and correctly criticized. The administration is fundamentally trying to expand the federal government’s role in housing with little understanding of how meddling with the appraisal process would ultimately affect prices and homebuyers.

The DOJ lawsuit and much of the Biden administration’s efforts on this issue are misguided. In this latest effort, the Justice Department is going beyond holding an allegedly prejudiced appraiser accountable. Along with Mykhailyna, the DOJ also names Rocket Mortgage, the lender with whom the homeowner was seeking a refinancing, as a co-defendant.

The DOJ’s decision to go after the mortgage lender for the actions of an appraiser in this case not only contradicts federal law, but also risks reversing years of housing industry reforms that keep home prices in check.

Setting precedent to hold lenders accountable for the actions of independent appraisers would reintroduce the conflicts of interest that helped inflate home prices and created a housing bubble in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. A repeat of those circumstances would make homes even more expensive and put homeownership even further out of reach for many Americans.

Passed in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act explicitly bars mortgage lenders from influencing appraisers. The legislation established appraiser independence by mandating that lenders order appraisals through third-party companies called appraisal management companies. These companies are a critical degree of separation between lenders and appraisers that protect the housing industry from the conflicts of interest that led to the 2008 disaster. The DOJ’s efforts to punish the lender in the Colorado lawsuit threaten to erode the independence of appraisers.

Before 2008, there were no appraisal management companies, and appraisers were heavily dependent on the mortgage lenders that assigned them work. That conflict of interest led appraisers to overvalue homes in order to authorize bigger and more profitable loans for the mortgage lenders. That fueled the market bubble that eventually popped, tanking the global economy, nearly toppling the entire financial sector, and setting many American families back years.

If the Biden DOJ has its way, the U.S. could return to the pre-2008 housing industry. The potential for baseless lawsuits alleging undervaluation will incentivize both appraisers and lenders to overvalue properties—fueling yet more home price inflation and injecting more risk into the system.

Housing costs are already out of control. Minority communities across this country are disproportionately locked out of homeownership. Rather than pursuing splashy headlines for baseless lawsuits that would ultimately hurt Americans and further exacerbate prices, the government should be diminishing the footprint of the government-sponsored enterprises—namely, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—that have helped create a second housing bubble in the past 20 years.

The bottom line is that the DOJ’s misguided efforts here could wind up hurting all aspiring homeowners, including the very people of color who the Biden administration says that it is trying to stand up for.

Existing civil right laws already protect homeowners against racially biased appraisal practices. These laws should continue to be enforced. Regulators or legislators could task the appraisal management companies with keeping a more watchful eye over the appraisers and potential trends in their work. But the effort to burden the mortgage lenders with the responsibility of solving appraisal discrimination is not only misguided, it is deeply harmful to aspiring homeowners, the housing sector, and the financial industry.

The incoming Trump administration should immediately audit the Biden administration’s backward housing reforms and halt this lawsuit before it causes damage to the system. Woke, affirmative action policies are misguided and wind up hurting everyone. Voters want a return to simple, logic-driven policy, and this is one area to start with.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Two weeks ago, former President Donald Trump announced these words to rallygoers in this Westmoreland County town at a packed event, which included several former Pittsburgh Steelers and steelworkers taking the stage to endorse him; the steelworkers even got the former president to put on a hard hat that ruffled his hair.

It was a statement that made the thousands of supporters, most of whom were young, go understandably wild with emotion. Many attendees I spoke to were young women, many of them mothers with their children, who could not wait to vote in the first election they were truly excited about.

Trump wasn’t wrong. Heading into the final stretch of the election, I’d rather be him than Vice President Kamala Harris in the Keystone State. Several pollsters across the political spectrum shared data showing that Trump has a consistent edge in Pennsylvania and that Harris is at a standstill.

However, he’s a better fit for the commonwealth than Harris for reasons beyond just polling. In weeklong travels across the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, all the indicators told a story, outside the worldview, or bubble, of Washington, D.C., and New York City, of why Harris has failed in key places to earn people’s votes and Trump has found a way to bring out new voters and earn just enough support to win the state. […]

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Final polling averages suggest that Trump has the advantage—and the momentum—heading into Election Day. Real Clear Polling has Trump edging out Harris by 0.1% in national polling and up in enough swing states to pass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

There has not been an election-altering October surprise—no Hunter Biden laptop, no missing emails. If there was one, however, it was President Joe Biden calling Trump supporters garbage.

“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something,” the president said during a virtual event, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

The comments outraged Trump’s supporters, just as Hillary Clinton’s comment calling them “deplorables” did in 2016. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign took the comments in stride. Following Biden’s comments, the former president held a press conference from the cockpit of a garbage truck with full campaign branding on the side.

Trump has completely derailed my evening. I have spent 90 minutes laughing at this man’s genius.

Again, hate em if ya want, but our 45th president just showed up in a garbage truck and is now speaking at his rally in an orange garbage man vest. I can’t even. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/FN1oFORjyJ

— Lindsay In South Carolina (@LindsayJPitcher) October 30, 2024

The former president even did a rally wearing a sanitation worker’s high-visibility vest after the stunt.

Left-wing media outlets have been after Trump since his first run for office in 2016.

The Media Research Center released findings on Oct. 28 that showed Trump’s media coverage was 85% negative compared to Harris’s 78% positive coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news broadcasts for the 2024 presidential race. Media Research Center analysts reviewed 660 stories about the presidential election on the news channels from July 21, the day Biden ended his candidacy, to Oct. 25.

In the 2016 presidential race, both Trump and Clinton received high amounts of negative coverage, with 91% negative for Trump and 79% negative for Clinton. In the coverage for the 2020 race, Trump received 92% negative coverage and Biden received 66% positive coverage.

Nevertheless, media bias has not prevented Trump from broadening his support.

Standing room only at Vance rally in Holland, Michigan, with a long line out the door! pic.twitter.com/xAatpL6ARe

— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) October 29, 2024

Trump, with a bold alternative media strategy, has brought together a motley crew of voices across the political spectrum, such as former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., entrepreneur Elon Musk, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, R-Hawaii.

During a recent interview on Fox News, Gabbard said she asks people in the audience to raise their hand if they are a Democrat or a former Democrat whenever she speaks at a Trump event.

“In almost every event, somewhere between 35-50% of the room will raise their hand,” she said in the Oct. 29 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend.

What excited Gabbard even more was the reaction of Trump supporters to those whose hands were raised. Trump supporters “stood up and cheered and welcomed them [Democrats and former Democrats] and just surrounded them, really, with love and kindness.”

Gabbard said a lot of people shared their experiences with her after the event.

“I had so many people come up to me at the end of that saying, ‘I came in here afraid. I’ve never been to a political rally before. I didn’t know what to expect. I’m a Democrat, lifelong Democrat, never voted before.’ Different variations of this, but each walking out saying, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump because of what I experienced here today,’” Gabbard said.

American voters may have come to Trump rallies for the fun, but Trump needs them to stay for Election Day to win.

As with every last issue pertaining to this election, Harris has not said much about the substance of her climate policy. But a review of her record suggests she’d be amenable to unleashing the Justice Department on energy providers, and her conspicuously quiet allies on the climate left are optimistic she’ll do just that.

Unleashing the Justice Department on American energy companies means hurtling this country deep into the last century. Traditional energy sources are essential for the world’s historic quality of life most Americans enjoy. Litigation will drive prices up.

The lawsuits will also strongarm a transition to electric vehicles, stoves, and water heaters that will remain unpopular with most people because they aren’t affordable and don’t work as well as gas-powered alternatives. Green New Deal lawfare unfolding at the state and local levels all over the country means to force those appliances onto an unwilling public through settlement terms or public spending funded by big money verdicts.

Harris is already aligned with climate lawfare. Harris investigated whether Exxon “repeatedly lied to the public and its shareholders about the risk to its business from climate change” during her tenure as California attorney general, according to the Los Angeles Times. The probe did not result in a lawsuit, though she was supportive of legal claims targeting energy providers as a presidential candidate. […]

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