Welcome to the weekend edition of the Editorial Board! I’m your host, John Stoehr. Before I get to what I posted recently, a few words about trust in the government, and I don’t mean the usual words about it.

Usually, we mean “conservatives” don’t trust. No matter how well and fairly the government actually performs, they still don’t, and they still don’t, because trust is a red herring. What they don’t really trust is a government out of their control that works for everyone, equally. 

We don’t need to talk about that anymore. What we need to talk about is the people who normally trust the government, meaning liberals. And we need to talk about the fact that, unlike “conservatives” who distrust the government for phony reasons, liberals have real reasons. The Trump regime is actively trying to hurt the American people. 

To give you just one example, the FDA announced this week that it would stop requiring drugmakers to use animal testing and instead permit artificial intelligence. I don’t know about you, but I do not want a robot to tell me whether a drug is going to hurt, maim or kill me. I want a human being to make that judgment based on human science. 

This example is a snapshot of a still-emerging reality that virtually none of us has fully reckoned with: there are things that all of us have taken for granted, for pretty much our entire lives, that we can no longer take for granted. I’m talking about things that we never think about: food inspection, air quality control, drug safety, deposit insurance, etc. And because we never had to think about them, we could live our lives. 

Now? Well, given that the president chose to tank the markets this week, it’s been hard to think about the things I want to do, because I’m preoccupied with the things I have to do, because I no longer have a government that will do those things quietly in the background.

I mean, for the first time in my life, I’m thinking about stuffing my mattress with cash. Not because of the stock market crash, though that was bad enough for my retirement, but because the regime is poised to gut the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC is the agency that has made it possible for everyone to walk around minding their own business, safe in the knowledge that no matter how stupid your banker is, your money won’t go down with him.

And government isn’t the only thing to distrust these days. 

The news media, the universities, the legal profession and all the companies whose products we buy every day – all of them are kneeling before the evil, not because they are being forced to, but because they seem to believe they can bargain with it. And our distrust is justified in cases like Columbia University’s. It completely caved to the regime’s demands and now the regime wants to take over the university. 

Right now, the Democrats are rebuilding, as they should. But the congressional elections are far away. The next presidential election, assuming we have one, is even farther. Meanwhile, the regime is taking a wrecking ball to everything that we have taken for granted since, I don’t know, the 1930s? And what no one is talking about is this: none of us knows how to live like this. We will figure it out. We will have to. But we can’t start until we admit to the truth of what’s happening to us.

Before I get to recent postings, a reminder:

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HERE’S WHAT YOU MISSED LAST WEEK

April 4, 2025
Resentful? Crash the economy and you’ll see what that means
Some are pretending they were duped. Don’t believe it.

April 5, 2025
Biden already did what Trump says he’s doing
The weekend edition of the Editorial Board.

April 7, 2025
Trump’s tariffs make more sense with a ‘plantation mentality’
The Republicans and the billionaires share it.

April 8, 2025
Wall Street bankers are just like every other Trump supporter
And they are shocked by the consequences of their choices.

April 9, 2025
Don’t overestimate the goodness of the American people
Hope comes from facing evil and acting accordingly.

April 10, 2025
Trump is shredding public trust in banking and investment
Never mind tariffs. He’s coming for the FDIC.

April 11, 2025
If you need polls to tell what evil is, what kind of liberal are you?
Liberals will get what they want when they do what liberals of old did.