INTRO:

• The trade war that almost everybody feared could happen has officially been launched, with U.S. tariffs against Mexico and Canada and those nations hitting back at the U.S. with tariffs of their own.
• The pilot of the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines flight near Reagan National Airport on Wednesday has been identified as a former White House aide during the Biden administration.
• The FAA is fighting a class-action lawsuit alleging it denied 1,000 people air-traffic controller jobs based on race, gender and other diversity hiring targets.
• Thousands of FBI executives have been ordered to retire, resign, or be fired, including any who participated in the prosecution of January 6 protesters. But the acting FBI director is refusing to comply with President Trump’s orders.
• Wyoming could be the first state to ban electronic voting machines.
• And a former adviser to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has been accused of conspiring to steal Fed trade secrets and give them to help China.

All these stories and more when the Worldview Report begins, right now!

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Good evening and welcome to the Worldview Report.

Leading off tonight, we have the makings of a global trade war now taking shape.

After making many threats and issuing many warnings that he would slap various countries with onerous trade tariffs, President Trump on Saturday announced the first wave of tariffs: 10 percent against China, and 25 percent against Mexico and Canada.

Trump blamed Mexico for the immigration and drug crisis in the United States. Mexico immediately responded with its own tariffs against the United States.

Investopedia defines a tariff as “a tax imposed by one country on the goods and services imported from another country to influence it, raise revenues, or protect competitive advantages.” 

It also lists some criticisms of implementing tariffs:

• They can make domestic industries less efficient and innovative by reducing competition.
• They can hurt domestic consumers since a lack of competition tends to push up prices.
• They can generate tensions by favoring specific industries or geographic regions over others. For example, tariffs designed to help manufacturers in cities may hurt consumers in rural areas who do not benefit from the policy and are likely to pay more for manufactured goods.
• Finally, an attempt to pressure a rival country by using tariffs can devolve into an unproductive cycle of retaliation, commonly known as a trade war.

In other words, the importer of foreign goods, U.S. companies in this case, pay the tariff fees and it gets passed along to consumers.

According to the executive order, energy resources from Canada will have a lower 10% tariff.

Vice President JD Vance appeared Sunday on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo and said the tariffs were retaliation for “decades of being taken advantage of.”

President Trump warned Americans in a post to Truth Social that some pain will likely be felt but is necessary to right the economic ship.

“WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!). BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.”

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One of the three soldiers aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with an American Airlines flight near Reagan National Airport on Wednesday has been identified as a former White House aide during the Biden administration.

The Army identified the soldier as 28-year-old Captain Rebecca Lobach, an aviation officer who had served since July 2019, as the pilot of the helicopter. Lobach’s military honors included the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, and Army Service Ribbon. She first enlisted in the North Carolina Army National Guard while in college in December 2018, according to CBS News.

Lobach previously worked as a White House social aide under President Joe Biden. Last month, she escorted designer Ralph Lauren through the White House when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The family said in a statement:

“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved Rebecca. She was a bright star in all our lives. She was kind, generous, brilliant, funny, ambitious and strong. No one dreamed bigger or worked harder to achieve her goals.”

Lobach's family had initially asked that the Army withhold her name due to privacy reasons. According to NPR, such a move is unusual in the event of accidents or combat deaths.

The two other soldiers killed in the crash were Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves, 39, and Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, 28, who served as the crew chief. As of now, two of the three bodies have been recovered from the wreckage, per CBS News.

The Black Hawk took off from Fort Belvoir in Virginia and was conducting a training mission when it collided with a commercial airplane approaching Reagan National Airport. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the helicopter pilots “were on a routine, annual re-training of night flights on a standard corridor for a continuity of government mission.”

The midair collision resulted in the deaths of all 67 people involved with no survivors.

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Zero Hedge reports that just as multiple air-travel tragedies have taken place, it’s been reported that the FAA is fighting a class-action lawsuit alleging it denied 1,000 people air-traffic controller jobs based on race, gender and other diversity hiring targets, according to the New York Post.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2015, resurfaced following the deadly midair collision in Washington, DC, last Wednesday, the deadliest U.S. aviation disaster in nearly 25 years. 

Less than 48 hours later, a small private plane crashed in Northeast Philadelphia, putting emphasis on the role of air-traffic control.

At the time of the Blackhawk helicopter incident in DC, staffing levels were reportedly not normal. 

Andrew Brigida, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, criticized the FAA’s focus on diversity and inclusion, suggesting it contributed to the likelihood of such an accident.

The New York Post report says the lawsuit claims the FAA, under the Obama administration, replaced a skill-based hiring system with a “biographical assessment” to increase minority hires.

Brigida, a white applicant, alleges racial discrimination after being rejected despite scoring 100% on his training exam at Arizona State University’s aviation program in 2013.

The FAA faces growing criticism over its hiring policies, with some, including President Trump, blaming diversity programs for understaffing and lower air traffic control standards.

Vice President JD Vance told Fox News the FAA was at least partly to blame for last week’s fatal plane crash in D.C.

WATCH VIDEO

https://rumble.com/embed/v6dvq9g/?pub=rze3r

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Thousands of leading FBI executives have been ordered to retire, resign, or be fired as early as Monday, including any who participated in the prosecution of January 6 protesters.

However, acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll is refusing to deliver the names of bureau employees involved in J6 cases against Trump supporters, according to reports.

CNN confirmed that the notifications extend “a purge that began last week at the Justice Department across the street.”

The outlet reported the officials “are at the executive assistant director level or special agent in charge level and include those who oversee cyber, national security and criminal investigations.”

DiscernReport reported that the significant shakeup includes a “clear intent by the Trump administration to reshape the leadership of these key law enforcement agencies.”

Officials overseeing the transition to the new administration of President Trump have been positive about their plans to address those who were promoted by ex-FBI chief Christopher Wray.

Already, the Justice Department lawyers who worked on special counsel Jack Smith's lawfare cases against Trump have been relieved of their duties, and FBI agents who worked on those cases are now also on edge.

Those cases included federal charges against Trump because of his opinions about the 2020 election process and his possession of presidential papers after he left office.

Smith and his team assembled a long list of felonies to bring against Trump, when in fact the same DOJ found Joe Biden had held government papers to which he was not entitled after his vice presidency, but gave him a pass on the offenses.

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President Trump has let it be known he is no fan of USAID, the US Agency for International Development, and he's determined to reform it by merging it into the U.S. State Department, or eliminate it altogether. 

That hasn’t set well with the bureaucrats within the agency and they have been throwing fits trying to resist the president’s orders. Somehow, they think that the electorate voted them into office and not the president.

Red State reports that, on Saturday night, Trump decided to mete out some more consequences for the uncooperative rebels. The outlet cited CNN reporting:

“Two top security officials at the US Agency for International Development were put on administrative leave Saturday night after refusing to allow officials from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access systems at the agency, even after DOGE personnel threatened to call law enforcement, multiple sources familiar told CNN.”

Personnel from the Musk-created office physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC, and were stopped, according to the CNN report.

The DOGE personnel demanded to be let in and threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access, two of the sources said.

USAID has a requested 2025 budget of $42.8 billion. It engages in all manner of stupid programs like paying to send condoms to the Taliban, along with all manner of money poured out overseas. 

This makes it a prime target for DOGE.

SHOW MUSK POST TO X

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886102414194835755

DOGE head Elon Musk let it be known what he thought of their futile resistance to the commander in chief. He wrote in a post to X:

“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

SHOW SECOND MUSK TWEET

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886098373251301427

In another post to X, Musk said, “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

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John Harold Rogers, a former adviser to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, has been accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to steal Fed trade secrets to help China.

The U.S. attorney's office outlined the charges faced by Rogers, a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who was arrested on Friday.

He apparently worked at the Fed's international finance division, which researches foreign economic activity, U.S. trade and global markets. 

Newsweek reports that the charges Rogers faces add to a climate of suspicion over claims China is undertaking an espionage campaign targeting U.S. government financial policies.

The 63-year-old Rogers has a Ph.D. in economics and was a senior advisor in the Fed's international finance division from 2010 to 2021, according to the Justice Department's press release.

Rogers is accused of sharing confidential FRB information with his co-conspirators, who worked for Chinese intelligence posing as graduate students at an unnamed Chinese university.

The data Rogers is accused of sharing from at least 2018 could have allowed China to manipulate the U.S. market, giving Beijing an advantage when buying or selling U.S. bonds or securities.

Rogers is accused of passing trade-secret information including deliberations about tariffs and sensitive market data by email or by printing it before traveling to China ahead of meeting with his co-conspirators.

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Wyoming could become the first State to ban electronic voting machines.

The Cowboy State Daily reports that a State House committee considered a bill on Friday that could break new ground in terms of free and fair elections. If it passes, the bill would force paper ballots to be hand-counted.

The committee heard a vocal appeal Friday from those in support of House Bill 215, which if it becomes law would make all elections in the state have ballots counted by hand. The committee did not vote on the 43-page bill and will continue hearing testimony Monday.

The bill is sponsored by Republican state Rep. Scott Smith but Smith quickly made it clear to the committee that Wyoming Voter Initiatives is the major operator behind it, deferring to members of the group that drafted the bill, who spent most of the time presenting it and explaining what it does.

Wyoming Voter Initiatives is a group of residents that recently got a property tax initiative on the 2026 Wyoming ballot. Last summer, it started a new effort to have all ballots counted by hand. The goal is to get this initiative on the 2026 ballot and implemented for the 2028 election cycle.

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Hospitals in Colorado, Virginia, and the nation’s capital said on January 30th that they have paused all transgender procedures for minors while they evaluate President Trump’s new executive order.

Denver Health in Colorado has stopped providing transgender surgeries such as breast removal for people under the age of 19, a spokesperson said, in order to comply with the executive order and continue receiving federal funding. It’s not clear whether the hospital will continue providing other transgender procedures and medicine for youth, such as puberty blockers.

In Virginia, VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond said it has suspended transgender medication and surgical procedures for those under 19 years old.

Children’s National Hospital in Washington said the hospital had “paused prescriptions of puberty blockers and hormone therapy to comply with the directives while we assess the situation further.”

The hospital already did not perform transgender surgeries on minors, according to a spokesperson.

Trump on Tuesday signed an order titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

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Time now for our nightly Worldview Report commentary.

In an effort to curb the rising number of fatal accidents caused by speeding, Washington state lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require certain drivers to equip their vehicles with AI-powered speed-limiting devices. 

House Bill 1596, heard in the House Transportation Committee, aims to impose “intelligent speed assistance devices” on cars of drivers with a history of speeding.

The proposed legislation would force drivers who have repeatedly violated speed limits to install a device that uses GPS technology to cap the vehicle’s speed according to the legal limits of the area they are driving in. These drivers would be allowed to exceed the speed limit up to three times a month.

The bill targets drivers who receive a new restricted license under this law, similar to how ignition interlock devices are mandated for drivers with a history of drunk driving. 

Drivers could also face court orders to install these devices if they have been caught racing or excessive speeding, defined as going at least 20 mph over the speed limit.

Democratic state Representative Mari Leavitt, one of the bill’s sponsors, emphasized the necessity of such measures, stating, “We’re losing Washingtonians and family members are losing loved ones unnecessarily, tragically and preventably… These aren’t accidents; they’re intentionally folks choosing behavior that is harming and often killing folks.”

While these types of nanny state measures may sound good, they almost always end badly. Giving government this kind of power means we have to trust that it won’t stray from its original purpose, which is safety, and end up being applied in totally different ways that are abusive and against our constitutional liberties as a free people.

Could these devices, for example, be used to remotely shut down the vehicles of dissidents and others the state has singled out as troublemakers? I think it’s a given. 

That’s one aspect of revolutionary AI technology that almost nobody is talking about. The Big Brother aspect. As AI becomes more widespread and powerful, we will need to be much more aggressively on guard against government abuses of power.

That does it for this edition of the Worldview Report. Thanks for tuning in and supporting this broadcast.

Until next time…