Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.
President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.
If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’
The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”
First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.
“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.
Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.
What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.
The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.
Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”
Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”
If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”
The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.
The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.
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Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.
The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.
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Conservatives have long noticed a disturbing pattern: Hispanic illegal aliens appear again and again in drunk-driving cases. Recent news searches bring up multiple examples, some involving the deaths of children.
This summer’s tragedy in Wisconsin made the problem impossible to ignore — yet the corporate left-wing press tried to do just that. Two high school sweethearts, Hallie Helgeson and Brady Heiling, died when a drunk driver going the wrong way slammed into their car. Just weeks earlier they had gone to prom together.
Americans deserve more than platitudes and silence. They deserve honesty about the cultural, biological, and policy factors behind drunk driving.
The driver was Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila, a Honduran illegal alien who had racked up multiple drunk-driving charges. She lived in a sanctuary jurisdiction that shielded her from deportation. Only under the Trump administration’s renewed immigration enforcement did local authorities finally hand her over to ICE.
The Wisconsin case was heartbreaking, but it was not unique. In 2007, the Raleigh News & Observer published a rare report on the problem. A Mexican man admitted he thought he “drove better after a few beers” and that drunk driving was normal in Mexico. At the time, alcohol-related crashes caused by Hispanic drivers in North Carolina were three times higher than for non-Hispanics.
The national data confirms the trend. Hispanic drunk-driving rates are roughly double those of whites. Alcohol-use disorder is three times as common. More than a third of Hispanic alcohol-dependent users relapse, compared with 23% of whites.
Binge-drinking drives much of the danger. Hispanics are more likely than whites to consume large amounts of alcohol in one sitting. Forty-two percent of Hispanic drinkers admit to three or more drinks per day, compared to 30% of whites.
Mexicans, who make up half of the illegal alien population, show the highest risk. Mexican-Americans are three times more likely than whites to develop alcohol-use disorder. FBI crime data reported last year shows that Hispanics, 19% of the U.S. population, account for 30% of drunk-driving arrests and 44% of public drunkenness arrests.
In California, where Hispanics made up 37% of the population at the time, they represented 44% of DUI charges in 2012 (the latest I could find). In North Carolina, Hispanics were just 8% of the population but accounted for 18% of 75,000 DUI arrests in 2007.
New Mexico illustrates the deadly stakes. With a population that is half Hispanic, the state suffers nearly three times the national alcohol-related death rate. Five people die every day from alcohol. Before reforms in the 2000s, New Mexico’s DUI crash rate stood 70% higher than the national average.
The pattern reflects Mexico itself. In the United States, drunk drivers cause 31% of traffic deaths. In Mexico, the figure is over 70%. About 24,000 Mexicans die annually in alcohol-linked crashes — more than twice the U.S. toll despite the population difference. Until recently, most Mexican states had no legal blood-alcohol limits, and licensing often required little more than paying a fee.
Native populations face even steeper risks. In McKinley County, New Mexico, where the population is 80% Native American, the alcohol-related death rate is three times higher than the state average and ten times the national average.
Research points to genetic factors. Enzymes that mediate alcohol’s effects vary by ethnic group. Indigenous populations, exposed to alcohol only in the last 300 years, show far higher vulnerability. With Mexicans being heavily Mestizo — roughly 20% indigenous and 60% mixed indigenous (Mestizo) — the biological risk compounds the cultural one.
Given decades of national campaigns against drunk driving, one might expect attention to this ethnic dimension. Instead, the media downplay or ignore it. An America First lobbying group once tried to enlist Mothers Against Drunk Driving to raise awareness, but the effort went nowhere.
Academics sometimes excuse the problem by claiming Hispanic immigrants drink out of depression or isolation. Yet the biggest consumers are Puerto Ricans, not Mexicans. Cuban-Americans drink the least. Mexican women report the lowest rates of all, meaning the averages are driven almost entirely by men.
And claims of “racial profiling” ring hollow. Most offenders are caught at night, their identities confirmed by arrest records, not stereotypes.
Democrats dismiss these realities for the same reason they ignore illegal aliens’ broader lawbreaking: victimhood politics. They portray Hispanics as downtrodden and conservatives as cruel.
But the grief of families like the Helgesons and Heilings is not a talking point. It is permanent loss. It is trauma that echoes for generations.
Americans deserve more than platitudes and silence. They deserve honesty about the cultural, biological, and policy factors behind drunk driving. They deserve leaders who will enforce immigration law, reject sanctuary loopholes, and tell the truth about the risks that put their families in danger.
An Antifa-connected researcher with rabid bias against the right is held out as an expert on deciding who is extreme.
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