Kerby Anderson
Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order that establishes a strategic bitcoin reserve. It will capitalize the bitcoin already owned by the Department of Treasury that was taken from criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings. It will not sell any bitcoin. And the Secretaries of Treasury and Commerce have been given the task of developing budget-neutral strategies for acquiring more.
At the same time, the executive order also establishes a digital asset stockpile that would consist of other digital assets owned by the Department of Treasury. There are no plans to acquire any more, and it is likely those will be sold off.
As you might imagine, there are proponents and opponents to the strategic bitcoin reserve. Many members of Trump’s cabinet are proponents of bitcoin and have bitcoin within their own financial portfolios. The executive order reminds voters of the pledge by candidate Trump to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.”
The opponents can be divided into two groups. One group opposes a bitcoin strategic reserve because they believe it won’t work. I first discussed bitcoin on the radio in 2017. For the last eight years, I have read and heard what is often called FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. We will no doubt hear all those erroneous claims once again.
The other opponents are those who believe the strategic reserve will work, and don’t want to reward bad behavior. This asset with a fixed supply of 21 million coins will increase in value and can be used to offset our current and future national debt. The debt came from politicians who ran up massive deficits and the Federal Reserve that printed the money to fund that fiscal irresponsibility.
Some people in the past feared the government might ban bitcoin. Instead, the government will be acquiring bitcoin.

Penna Dexter
Thankfully, the predicted long wait to learn the 2024 presidential outcome did not come to fruition last November. But results for many down-ballot races were delayed — some for weeks.
Experts warn that we have much more to do to clean up our elections.
The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas points to Germany’s recent election in which all votes were counted on election night. We should ask ourselves why we often can’t do that here in the U.S.
Mr. Lucas cites several differences between our elections and those conducted in European democracies:

In many countries, especially parliamentary systems, the ballots are simpler. Germans voted for the party. The U.S. is a larger country with ballots which are longer and more complex.
Plus our system is decentralized. States run their own elections, creating most of their own rules.
But the most consequential cause of delays in vote counting in U.S. elections is the widespread use of mail-in ballots.

In his book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, Fred Lucas notes that nearly three fourths of countries in the European Union “don’t allow mail-in voting without specific reasons.”
According to J. Christian Adams, President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, “These countries have in-person voting at the polling place and have results on election night.” What’s more, he says, “every European country except Britain has voter ID requirements.”  In the U.S., several states lack this fundamental protection.
Election law attorney, author and podcaster Cleta Mitchell founded the Election Integrity Network, a coalition dedicated to the security of every American vote. She recommends several commonsense protections. One that should be a no-brainer is: Do not let non-citizens participate in our elections. A federal bill requiring voter ID, the SAVE Act, awaits a vote in Congress.
Ms. Mitchell also says we should return to election-day and precinct-based, supervised voting. And paper ballots. For more, see Votefair2026.com.

Kerby Anderson
A recent educational report illustrates that our public schools are politically skewed. It concluded that the Marxist Howard Zinn’s book is used in a fourth (25%) of all American classrooms.
Educator Larry Sand explains that Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, approaches history from a Marxist perspective. “Zinn maintained that the teaching of history should serve society in some way and that objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable.” Zinn even admitted that he wrote his book to create a revolution.
If you want to know more about Howard Zinn and his education project, you can follow the link to this commentary. Even better, you might want to obtain the book, Debunking Howard Zinn, written by Mary Grabar. I did an hour interview with her about the book a few years ago.
Larry Sand concludes that students may be becoming an experts in Marxist dogma, but they aren’t learning U.S. history. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a national survey of college students. It tested them about their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without a basic grasp of the nation’s history and political system. He also cites other surveys that come to the same discouraging conclusion.
In many cases, foreigners who come to the U.S. to become citizens learn more about our history and governmental structure than young people who attend our public schools. Why not require high school students to pass the citizenship test? Recently, the governor of Iowa announced a bill that would require high school students to pass the citizenship test to graduate. If the bill passes, Iowa will become the 14th state to adopt such a measure.
Our schools aren’t teaching history, and what they do teach is often politically skewed.