I think this may be the most California story of all time.

In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated the groundbreaking of a giant wildlife bridge across the 101 Freeway in Southern California. He noted that while the project came with a $54 million price tag, it could be completed with another $10 million.

For those who’ve followed the California bullet train to nowhere fiasco, you know where this is going.

On Wednesday, City Journal published a report by Chris Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp highlighting how Newsom’s bridge project was still not done despite being scheduled for completion in 2025.

And shock of shocks, the bridge to nowhere is $21 million over budget with a projected price tag of $114 million and an indefinite timeline for completion. A chunk of that money, $25 million, came from “Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation,” but the rest is being covered by California taxpayers.

Oof.

Now, you may still be wondering what kind of “wildlife” this bridge is intended to protect for such a hefty sum.

Brooklyn Robinson, the assistant to the vice president for Strategic Communications at The Heritage Foundation, told me that she visited the bridge on a class field trip and asked some questions.

“While on the class trip to the infamous bridge, I asked the guide what animals the bridge will benefit most, assuming she would say the mountain lions,” Robinson said. “Because, of course, one mountain lion dying on the 101 is what sparked this multimillion-dollar project. But I was wrong, she told me the main species that would benefit was a butterfly. This confused me because I thought butterflies could fly … and therefore would not need a bridge to cross a highway. I guess I was uninformed!”

Now I could make a few snide comments here. A bridge for butterflies, seriously? Aren’t there already plenty of accessible “cougar” dens in Santa Monica?

But to give California the benefit of the doubt, there are plenty of similar overpasses built in other states that haven’t been driven crazy by Left Coast environmentalist whacko-ism.

The difference is, those projects were completed within reasonable budget parameters and in relatively short order.

I don’t think it’s wrong to question the leadership of this now hundred-million-dollar endeavor. Below is a video of Beth Pratt, the left-wing environmentalist activist who has been put in charge of the project.

Brace yourself.

Ah, there we go. The lady in the pink vest holding a stuffed animal says that the state with what the governor calls the “4th largest economy in the world” can’t finish this project because of President Donald Trump and tariffs or something.

Funny, I don’t recall Trump being president back in 2022.

I don’t want to be mean, but I can’t say that this X post doesn’t reflect exactly what I was thinking when I saw the video.

We should reasonably ask if this is just another gargantuan California boondoggle in a state that long ago forgot how to efficiently build infrastructure or practically anything at all.

“There’s no boondoggle, there’s no people stealing money,” Pratt said when questioned about the bridge in January.

Rufo and Schrupp weren’t convinced. And given how much this story falls in line with the modern blue state patronage model, I’m not either.

The bridge supporting Wildlife Crossing Fund, cited by the City Journal, used government data to say that “’for every $1 billion spent’ on wildlife crossings, ‘13,000 jobs are created.’”

And as Rufo and Schrupp found, many of those “jobs” are absurd.

“The National Wildlife Federation’s WAWC website claims that ‘[o]ur Native Plant Nursery’—apparently funded by the nonprofit SAMO Fund and other ‘partners’—‘has prioritized hiring Indigenous team members to help steward the plants that will vegetate the bridge,’” they wrote. “The nursery’s co-manager said she makes an ‘offering’ after collecting seeds, sometimes including pieces of her hair.”

Here’s another job created.

“The nursery’s founding manager worked with ‘helpers and volunteers’ to ‘seed scout[]’ across the Santa Monica Mountains,” Rufo and Schrupp wrote. “Her associates on the ‘design team’ received ‘feedback from all the various project partners’—including state and federal bureaucrats—for their plant list.”

Even if everything here is being done legally, it’s still an absolute insult to state taxpayers. It would almost be a relief to think that the money was simply being stolen under the noses of state authorities. But that’s not what this looks like to me.

As you can imagine, Newsom responded to the allegations that his glorious butterfly bridge is a boondoggle with his typical grace and concern for government propriety.

Newsom—or really one of his Zoomer interns—went with an online “gotcha,” posting a picture of two assumedly disastrous bridge projects in Texas and Florida, two states he seems particularly concerned about for some reason.

The problem is that the pictures—clearly meant to show incomplete bridges—were of old, decommissioned bridges in the process of being taken down. In one of the pictures, you can actually see the new bridge completed on the other side if you click on it. Oops.

Newsom can say whatever he wants, but the butterfly bridge is just another example of the kind of dysfunction that’s become endemic in the Golden State. This is all worthwhile if you are politically connected or are otherwise on the public dole, I suppose. It’s not so great for everyone else.

And California, as wealthy as it is, can’t keep doing this forever. The tech money will eventually dry up. The budget deficit is already alarmingly high, and the proposed “wealth tax” won’t fix things. If anything, it will make the problem much worse.

The good news for Newsom is that the whole thing may only truly blow up when he’s out of office at the end of the year. I’m sure a man with such noted humility will settle into a fine, modest retirement away from the public spotlight.

The post Newsom’s ‘Butterfly’ Bridge to Nowhere Is Symbolic of California’s Dysfunction appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson.

2026 looks like it’s going to be the most tumultuous, geo-strategically significant and dangerous year since the fall of the Soviet system and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The whole world is in upheaval. Donald Trump is the catalyst of this. A lot of people, both in his base and his opponents, both here in the United States and abroad, blame him.

I think a few years ago, one European diplomat said, “Well, he’s a bull in a China shop, only he’s a bull in a nuclear China shop.” Maybe, maybe not.

But let’s just review what’s taking place right now. For the second time, we’re bombing Iran, and this time the negotiations clearly were not going to lead to this 47-year problem resolution.

Iran’s theocracy has no intention of stopping nuclear proliferation. It wants a bomb to dominate the Middle East, to intimidate the petro kingdoms of the Gulf, to show its dominance over Sunni Islam, and to destroy eventually Israel, threaten Europe for blackmail concessions and eventually us.

We’ve known that. Every president, all seven of them before Trump, said that, and they were going take care of the problem or prevent it from exacerbating. None did anything.

Trump tried to negotiate, take out the nuclear facilities, and then he learned that they were still trying to, after the bombing: restore them, expand their Russia, North Korean, Chinese ballistic missile force, ensure that nobody would dare attack them again.

And Trump did. And this time his plan is to remove either now or so detrite the theocracy that it would erode in the next few months by a popular uprising or maybe have a Venezuela solution. Barring that, at least make it inert militarily.

This follows the [Nicolas] Maduro, what do we call it, kidnapping coup. We removed this communist thug, drug lord, shipper of dangerous opiates into the United States, propped up Cuba and was trying to spread the Chavez communist message throughout Latin America. It looked like he was succeeding under Joe Biden. Now the whole world there is different.

Venezuela doesn’t have Maduro. It has a strong government in the sense that they will keep order, and maybe they will have transitions to democracy. We hope so. But they are terrified of the United States that removed their government and told them they put the oil on the world market, they reform their economy, they get the Chinese out, and they will have a bright future.

This coincides with democratic revolutions in Central America, Chile, maybe Bolivia and Peru. We’ll see how those work out. And of course, Argentina.

So it’s a whole new Latin America. It’s experiencing a westernized constitutional system revolution. And again, the catalyst has been Donald Trump.

First, by telling the Panamanians, “We know what you’re doing. It’s not smart for you to do this, to triangulate with the Chinese. If you do it, we’ll take back the canal.” And he got results. And the result is China and Russia are now excluded from the Western Hemisphere.

At the same time, he’s pressuring the Cubans. They have no more subsidized oil from Russia. They know that their drugs—that they are intermediaries in smuggling and shipping to the U.S.—are being blown up on the high seas. There’s no more Chavez-Maduro free fuel, and their innately incompetent and inert economy is imploding.

And Trump is basically saying, “You saw what happened to Venezuela, you saw what happened to Iran. You’re not halfway across the world. You’re not down in South America. You’re right here 90 miles away from us. And this will be a cakewalk if you don’t try to reform and give your people a choice, an economic liberation, a political liberation, a cultural, social liberation.”

And it looks like they’re going allow American businessmen, mostly Cuban Americans, to go back in there and invest.

If that happens and you start to see offshore companies, energy development, hotels, tourism, communism will die on the vine.

So what am I getting at? I’m getting at that there’s a world upheaval that Donald Trump sort of took a fuse and he lit it, and things are blowing up everywhere, and everybody is paranoid and crazy, and they’re thinking that he’s a disruptor.

And then we have the Ukraine war, and he has convinced the Europeans that you have to do two things that they don’t understand. You can’t buy energy from Russia. Maybe he’s lifted that because the Straits of Hormuz are closed temporarily. But you can’t subsidize the Russian war machine and then tell the United States that because of your suicidal energy policies, you have to do that. But you also have to have the United States step in and save you.

And so, we’re trying to find a solution, but one of the tactics that Trump is using, that’s very misunderstood. He is trying to say [Vladimir] Putin is a monster. Of course, he is. Don’t trust him. But I wasn’t the one that started this crazy reset. I was the one that got rid of the Wagner Group. I was the one that went after the oligarchs. I was the one that got out of the missile treaty. I was the one that gave offensive weapons to Ukraine, not you.

I was the one that warned you about the Nord Stream pipeline, not you, not [Joe] Biden. I did. So here, if I’m going to get involved, don’t demonize him, because we can weaken him and then we can flip him so that he doesn’t go back into Europe, but he also triangulates against China.

So what I’m getting at, if that happens, and you see a different government in Cuba, Venezuela and a tidal wave of reform in Latin America, where at the same time you get rid of the 47-year cancer in the Middle East for which American troops have been based, take away the Iranian theocracy, and there’s not going to be 200 installations of Americans in Syria and Iraq.

And then you add into the combination what Cuba has done to us all these years. It’s been a receptacle of American terrorists, hijackers, drug smugglers.

At one time, remember, it was going to base nuclear weapons from Russia pointed at us, the Cuban Missile Crisis of ’62. It’s just been a headache.

If you could solve all of those things in one year, it would be unheard of. It would make [Ronald] Reagan’s achievement of destroying the Soviet Union, although it fell during the successor George H.W. Bush, it would look minor in comparison almost.

Think about this very quickly. This was not necessary in Trump’s political calculus. He had the midterms coming up. Eight or nine months when he went into Venezuela and Iran. That took a great risk to distract attention away from the economy. The economy had been moribund under Joe Biden, and it was starting to pick up, and he was bragging about the low cost of energy.

If you’re just a political animal, what you don’t do right before the midterms is go into two of the largest oil-producing countries in the world and, for the short term at least, ensure their oil is going be reduced. And yet he took that risk.

And more importantly, he knows how Europe feels about it. Europe is so touchy because they have ruled out basically producing their own natural gas, their own oil. They’re very reluctant to follow the French example of nuclear power. And the result is they’re very dependent on imported oil, and they’re whispering to Trump, “Don’t do this, don’t be disruptive.” So he’s got a problem with this.

And then the MAGA base, remember, says, “No optional wars abroad.” And Trump is trying to say, well, these are using air power. I haven’t used ground troops. This is not Afghanistan. These are going to be short-term solutions to long-term problems. And in the future, if we’re successful, there’ll be fewer Americans abroad because we’ll have a greater number of American allies and friends who will be consensual.

They’ll be ruled by consensual governments. They’ll have free economies. And more importantly, they will have a different attitude or view of the United States, not one as a reluctant weakling or an unarmed or a Joe Biden, Barack Obama appeaser, but somebody who’s very unpredictable but follows up what he says, and they will be more likely to respect and join us. Strength radiates friendship, weakness repels it.

Finally, again, I think we misunderstood what’s going on. There are disruptions all over the world, but three quarters of them are reaching a consensus, an end, some type of resolution one way or the other.

I don’t know how they’re all going turn out, but there is a good chance they could turn out with the United States in a preeminent position that we haven’t seen at least since WWII.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Why 2026 Could Be the Most Dangerous and Transformational Year Since World War II appeared first on The Daily Signal.

After decades in the spotlight, the country’s most famous roundhouse-kicking conservative might be showing his age. Chuck Norris, the actor and martial arts star, has been hospitalized in Hawaii after […]

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On Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland made the mistake of practicing history without a license. Then again, from Critical Race Theory to other Marxist-inspired madness, Democrats have already […]

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Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei ostensibly released a defiant written statement on Wednesday, vowing to retaliate for the death of security chief Ali Larijani.

The post Cardboard Khamenei, Still Hiding from Public, Issues Ominous Written Message: ‘All Blood Has Its Price’ appeared first on Breitbart.

A former high school principal who once celebrated the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is headed to prison for possession of child pornography. After Kirk’s assassination on […]

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At 5 years old, Dalilah Coleman suffered life-altering injuries ath the hands of a reckless illegal immigrant truck driver.

The illegal immigrant driver’s 18-wheeler blew a stop sign, crashed into the Coleman family’s car, and left Dalilah, now 7 years old, with permanent brain damage.

Tragic stories like Dalilah’s have become an all too common occurrence, and it’s kicked Republicans in Washington, D.C. into high gear to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining Commercial Driver’s Licenses, or CDLs. Legislation that could have prevented the crash that hurt Dalilah was voted out of committee on Wednesday and is expected to head to the House floor for a vote very soon.

“We cannot afford to lower that standard [to obtain a commercial driver’s license], especially when the consequences are measured in lives,” said Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., at a Republican Study Committee roundtable highlighting Republican legislation that would crack down on illegal immigrants with CDLs.

Houchin noted that in the past five months, seven people in her home state of Indiana have lost their lives from crashes involving illegal immigrants.

The legislation, named Dalilah’s Law, works to prevent CDLs from falling in the hands of illegal immigrants by requiring applicants be a U.S. citizen and a live in the state in which they are applying.

The bill also incorporates language from Rep. David Taylor, R-Ohio, and requires CDL holders are proficient in English.

Previously known as the Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act, the bill was introduced in October by Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C.

Rouzer is a senior member on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and worked on the bill in coordination with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and other department personnel.

Rouzer told the Daily Signal that the Department of Transportation is already working with states to revoke illegal immigrant CDLs, but this legislation will codify the administration’s efforts as federal law.

President Donald Trump recognized Dalilah during his State of the Union address earlier this month for her courage and joy in the face of serious hardship and to encourage congressional action.

Because of the accident, Dalilah is non-verbal, had to re-learn how to walk, and has now been diagnosed with diplegic cerebral palsy.

Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Republican Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., Andy Barr, R-Ky, and Houchin have all introduced Dalilah’s Law legislation.

“The goal is straight forward, if you’re in this country illegally, you should not be able to obtain a commercial driver’s license, and if that standard is violated, there should be serious consequences, including permanent disqualification from operating a commercial vehicle,” said Houchin.  

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., got emotional at the Thursday RSC event. Looking at Dalilah sitting and laughing with her father, Burchett said she reminded him of his own daughter. “It’s very personal to me that we as a country can not come together on this issue,” Burchett said. 

Rep. Vince Fong, R-Calif., also said the issue was “very personal.”

“The Colemans are from my community, they are constituents of mine,” Fong said. “Dalilah, when you meet her, how can you not be inspired by what she’s gone though, and how she’s overcome.”  

The 2024 crash that injured Dalilah occurred in Rep. Jay Obernolte’s, R-Calif., district.

“It boggles my mind that next week, this bill will have opposition,” Obernolte said. “It is just common sense.”

“They seem to be more interested in representing those that don’t speak English than those that do speak English,” Rouzer told reporters of the expected Democrat opposition.

“Quite candidly, I think it’s just a reflection of how far off the deep end the Democratic party has gone,” he continued.  

“There’s no Republican or Democrat roads, just U.S. roads,” said Dalilah’s father, Marcus Coleman, who is a truck driver himself. He told reporters his hope is for everyone to “get together with their counterparts on the Democrat side and try to persuade.”

The post ‘Very Personal’: GOP Pushing for Dalilah’s Law Vote on House Floor Soon appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A wildlife overpass in Democrat-run California remains unfinished and has gone far over budget, according to a report from the City Journal.

The post Report: Cost of California’s Unfinished ‘Wildlife Crossing’ Hits $114 Million appeared first on Breitbart.