On Friday, President Trump posted on his social media network Truth Social a promise to rescind former President Biden’s executive order phasing out plastic straw use in the federal government.
“I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work. BACK TO PLASTIC!” wrote the president.
Some might interpret Trump’s attention to this matter as frivolous, just another example of an undisciplined president who still hasn’t learned how to pick his battles. Certainly, his detractors in the media will present it this way, whether they believe it themselves or not.
But there is another way to look at Trump’s tirade, which is likely far more calculated than its presentation may appear. It is a clear message to his adversaries that no stone will be left unturned in what can only be described as the beginning of a cultural counterrevolution the Trump administration has begun during the opening weeks of his second term in office.
This counterrevolution has been launched with a “shock and awe” approach. In the space of a few weeks, Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, dismantled USAID, begun the process of abolishing the Department of Education, and ordered schools to cease allowing biological men to compete against women in sports or lose their federal funding. He has even committed to siccing DOGE on the Department of Defense, something Trump 2016-20 would never have considered.
Oh, and the straw nonsense. That’s over, too. No stone unturned.
The cultural counterrevolution’s goal, of course, is to overturn the cultural revolution which began in the 1960s, accelerated during the Obama administration, and reached its climax during the Biden administration. Its philosophical roots in the Frankfurt School, transplanted to the United States during the 1930s, it set out overthrow what was left of classical liberal America after the New Deal and WWII.
Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?
