Previously on PolicySphere Articles:

→ Opinion: Five Reasons Why Even A Temporary Amnesty Or Guest Worker Program Is A Very Bad Idea

→ Modest Proposal: President Trump Should Hire Bill Gates As Global Ambassador For Development Programs

→ Analysis: DOGE And Trump Not Responsible For Texas Flash Floods

→ Opinion: The Trump DOJ Is Probably Right About Jeffrey Epstein

Happy Bastille Day!

Did you know: "Bastille Day" is the Anglo-American expression; in France, the holiday is known prosaically as "le Quatorze Juillet" because it commemorates not one, but two events. The first is the July 14 1789 Storming of the Bastille, which, in reality, was a gruesome event of mob violence. The commander of the Bastille prison allowed the crowd to visit the prison to show there were no political prisoners there (as indeed there weren't, there were very few prisoners and most who were there were there for vagrancy) on the promise that they would not commit violence; they massacred everyone there and, fatefully and ominously, carried the commander's head on a pike through the streets in procession. Some might still argue that the event may still be remembered positively as a strike against arbitrary imprisonment and for rule of law… Much more interesting, and much more worth celebrating, is the other event commemorated by the French on July 14: July 14, 1790, the "Fête de la Fédération," a great celebration on the Martian Fields combining the King, the Aristocracy, the Clergy, and representatives of the National Assembly, where King Louis XVI wore for the first time the Tricolore cockade. Why Tricolore? Because the blue and the red, the colors of Paris, represented the people, and the white, traditionally, is…the color of the French Monarchy. The actual symbolic meaning of the Tricolore is the union of the King and the People. So, yes, Republican France has a Monarchist flag…

Anyway: we recently wrote about an interesting article by Aiden Buzzetti of the Bull Moose Project that highlighted Brendan Carr of the FCC as a blueprint for the future of MAGA governance.

Buzzetti's case was basically this: Carr's agenda isn't driven by either making facile populist red-meat slop or rigid adherence to abstract conservative ideology, but on delivering concrete results for voters.

And indeed this is true. Carr talks a lot about deregulation, to the point of sounding like a traditional free market Republican, but with interesting and crucial nuances. Deregulation is always tied to concrete benefits for the average person, and Carr always highlights the necessity to make government more effective as well as smaller. Deregulation is never presented as the necessary conclusion of some abstract principle, but as a common sense approach linked to the real world, fostered by conversations with with "tower climbers in South Dakota, rural farmers, small-town nurses, and telecom crews."

This is, indeed, exactly what the future of MAGA Governance should look like.

So this led us to take a second look at Carr's recent "Build Agenda for America" speech, where he laid out his agenda. And it is very good.

Here are the main sections, and our commentary:

"Unleashing High-Speed Infrastructure Builds." Here, the deregulatory agenda is obvious, but justifiably so. It is simply true that an antique permitting process has made it too slow to roll out high-speed infrastructure in the US. And Carr highlights that these are infrastructure projects.

"Restoring America’s Leadership in Wireless." A key component here is freeing up more spectrum for auctions, which was achieved in the OBBB.

"Boosting America’s Space Economy." This is timely. Some might snark that it only was, until Elon Musk's loud breakup with the Administration, but this would be to miss the point. It is shaped by necessity, and by the humiliation of the Biden Administration rolling out, to much fanfare, a rural broadband plan that never went anywhere, while they turned down Elon Musk's Starlink for political reasons.

"Cutting Red Tape and Modernizing FCC Operations." Note that the "cutting red tape" part of the speech is only third, and comes after the stuff about delivering concrete gains. Also note that it includes the idea that the FCC should be more effective, not just that it should be smaller.

"Advancing America’s National Security and Public Safety." If it's MAGA in 2025, it must have a Chyna angle, and that's good. And in the case of communications networks, certainly appropriate.

"Strengthening America’s Telecom Workforce." And, finally, there is the nod to manufacturing and blue collar jobs and upskilling to provide for more manufacturing jobs in the US.

Again, the point here is not so much to highlight each specific agenda item, though they are all good and interesting, it's to highlight the overall framing.

The job of a MAGA leader is not to throw out red meat, or to apply abstract ideologies such as free market conservatism because they exist, out there, free floating. It is to use effective governance to deliver concrete wins for the American citizens.

And, also, it is to build. "Building" seems to be a watchword for the smartest elements in this Administration, and it seems to be a good theme that unites the various strands of its urges and its coalition, from MAGA patriots to the tech right, in much the same way that JD Vance declared "building" a pillar of his vision of citizenship in a recent speech at the Claremont Institute.

SEE ALSO: JD Vance's Speech At The Claremont Institute

Policy News You Need To Know

#MAHA #SunAndSteel — Derek Thompson, who is now at Substack, has a good post out showing that exercise seems to truly have wonderful effects on health, physical and mental. He points out that two big recent studies have strengthened the case: "Euan Ashley, the chair of medicine at Stanford, and a team of bioinformatics researchers put rats on treadmills, cut into their tissues, and found that exercise basically improved every measurable system, including metabolism, mitochondrial function, immunity, inflammation, and tissue-specific adaptation. He has estimated that 'one minute of exercise, on average, extends one's life by five minutes.'" Furthermore, "In a recent NEJM study, 900 patients who had undergone surgery on their advanced colon cancer were randomly assigned to two groups: a 'structured exercise program' vs. a control group. The exercise group saw 'significantly' more years without cancer, a 7 percentage point increase in the overall survival rate after 8 years, and a dramatic reduction in new primary cancers." More here.

#FreeSpeech #America — In an extremely important decision for free speech and American values generally, Douglass Mackey, who had been tried and sentenced by the Biden DOJ for posting anti-Hillary Clinton memes, has seen his convictions overturned on appeal.

#MAGACommunism — DoD has just made a landmark, very interesting deal. The Pentagon will invest $400 million in convertible preferred stock (plus a warrant for additional shares) in MP Materials, the lone American manufacturer of rare earth magnets, a key strategic asset in the making of advanced technologies, including defense technologies. DoD could become MP’s largest shareholder with up to 15% ownership upon full conversion and exercise. As part of the deal, DoD guaranteeing a price floor of $110 per kilogram for MP Materials’ neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) products—roughly double the current Chinese market price—for 10 years, ensuring stable revenues for MP and insulating the U.S. supply chain from volatile global pricing and non-market forces. MP will also build a second domestic magnet manufacturing plant (dubbed the “10X Facility”) to add 10,000 metric tons of annual rare earth magnet production capacity, expected to begin commissioning in 2028. Honestly, we cannot find anything bad to say about this. This is industrial policy well done. It creates a market for a key asset that's vital to American national security and innovation.

#Agriculture #MAHA #AnimalCruelty — American pig farms sometimes use gestation crates, which are pretty much what they sound like: cages where pregnant sows are held for the duration of their pregnancy. In an initiative, California voters banned this practice as cruel; overall, nine states have banned the practice. There are rumors that the Department of Ag, under pressure from Big Ag interests, might overturn those state bans. In an era of MAHA, and of greater conservative interest in conservation, this seems like a bad idea. But wait. Your writer spent some portion of his life in the country. Talk to every pig farmer, and he will tell you that pigs are often very violent towards each other. "Free range" pigs are wonderful, but farmers who have free range pigs spend a lot of time preventing pigs from bullying, injurying, and sometimes even killing other pigs, especially weak pigs, such as pregnant sows. Interestingly, the EU allows the use of pregnancy crates during the first four weeks of pregnancy (sows are pregnant for 15 weeks), as well as after delivery and in other special circumstances. This is a significant but not total limitation, which suggests that there is a legitimate use for pregnancy crates. This is the problem with "animal cruelty" discourse, so often: urban and suburban dwellers with no experience of farming project their beliefs onto animals, but people who have lived with animals know that they have their own logic and their own mind.

#LGBT — Harrowing, terrifying report from gender activist Beth Bourne. The "Trevor Project" is a popular-among-the-left NGO that works with "at-risk LGBT youth." The Trump Administration has sought to pull their Federal funding over their support of transgenderism. Within that context, here is the story Bourne tells, with receipts: "Today I called the Trevor Project Suicide Hotline number posing as a 15-year-old girl who believes she is a transgender boy. I told the Trevor Project crisis counselor that my mom misgendered me and made me feel unsafe at home. I asked if moving into my softball coach's house was a good idea as he promised to help me get online 'T' (testosterone) and my breasts removed (top surgery). The Trevor Project counselor said it sounded like a great plan." The use of the term "grooming" in the context of LGBT issues is very controversial. Sometimes, the use is metaphorical, and refers to adult trying to indoctrinate kids into gender ideology before they are ready or outside sound guidelines or sidestepping parents' rights. But sometimes, the grooming can be quite literal: pedophiles using the excuse of "LGBT" and gender ideology to prey on minors. Apparently counselors of this lauded "LGBT" NGO think it's great for a teenage girl to run away from her parents' home and move in with her softball coach. The response here is not just cutting funding, it's sending in the FBI and examining the computers and devices of every Trevor Project employee, funder, and volunteer, and then using RICO charges to expand the net.

#Immigration — You may recall that President Trump reinstated the so-called—incorrectly so-called, in fact, "Muslim Ban," which is really a ban or travel restriction on a specific number of countries that pose specific security risks. At the Center for Immigration Studies, George Fishman argues for supersizing the entry ban. The basic idea is this: the entry ban should cover countries whose nationals have a high rate of visa overstays. As he notes, "upwards of 40 percent of the illegal alien population in the U.S. did not cross the border illegally, but rather came here legally on a temporary basis and then overstayed their visas." Furthermore, he writes, "nationals of 31 countries have higher estimated B visa overstay rates than do at least one of the countries subjected to the 2025 entry ban in part because of their nationals’ overstay rates, as do nationals of 67 countries with regard to F/M/J visa overstay rates." The logic is sound…

#Housing #Nicolas30Ans — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has introduced the “No Tax on Home Sales Act,” a sweeping proposal to "eliminate the federal capital gains tax on home sales." The bill would eliminate federal capital gains tax on primary residence sales, building on the current IRS exclusion of up to $250,000 ($500,000 for couples) that requires two years of ownership and use. This might increase liquidity in the housing market, and encourage some Boomers to cash out their home equity gains, thereby perhaps indirectly making it easier for younger buyers to get on the housing ladder. We're not sure if this is the best way to do it, however (to put it mildly).

#ReligiousLiberty — The state of Washington passed a law mandating that Catholic priests break the seal of the confessional in certain circumstances. This is obviously horrid and totally unnecessary. The bishops of Washington have sued to prevent the implementation of the law, and the Justice Department has joined the lawsuit. Today, Bishop Robert Barron, who is famous in conservative Catholic circles for his Word on Fire ministries, has announced that he has filed an amicus curiae brief in that lawsuit, with the assistance of the Thomas More Society. Several points must be made, here. First, God's law is above man's law. Second, the rules of the Catholic Church apply all over the world and with a 2000 year history in mind: it's not hard to understand why they would have very strong rules against allowing priests to be used as state informants if one thinks about it for five seconds. Third, there is longstanding precedent for allowing certain professions to have iron secrecy: priests, obvioulsy, but also lawyers, doctors, counselors… Only tyrannical states seek to prevent that. Fourth, most importantly, the potential impact of this law is zero. If someone confesses a murder to a priest, the priest is mandated to withhold absolution unless that person turns themselves in. How many people have enough fear of God to seek confession for a crime, but not so much that they won't obey the priest in the confessional? How many hardened criminals, who are already unlikely to seek absolution to begin with, would do so in the knowledge that a priest might snitch on them? Zero additional criminals will be caught in application of this law. Which reveals its real intent, which is to make religious institutions arms of the state. Any civilized person must reject that inherently totalitarian proposition.

#Porn #BigTech — You may not have expected this, though if you think about it for a few minutes it makes a lot of sense: a new survey shows that young men are one of the most supportive demographics when it comes to restricting access to online pornography.