It's a growing problem.

Jason and Brittany Aldean have had quite the interesting family vacation this year. The country music family packed up and headed for a mountain vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and apparently no one told them they'd be coexisting with bears that live there year round. I'm sure you can already tell where this story is heading (especially since you saw the title and quite literally clicked on it), but let's start at the very beginning, shall we? Fans of the Aldeans have been able to keep up to date with the family vacation thanks to Brittany Aldean, who has been posting occasional pictures, videos and messages on her Instagram story. It first got kicked off with some car ride pictures, and then a stop at Buc-ee's (road trip essential if you ask me). Once they got to their vacation destination, a selfie video from inside their cabin was uploaded along with the message: "Family trip 2024 has begun." So one could say that post marked the official start of their family vacation. Not even an hour later, Brittany added another video, but this time there wasn't a bunch of smiling and peace-signs being thrown about. Instead, Brittany took a video of her and Jason's real-time reactions as they watched a family of bears break into and tear through all of the vehicles that were parked outside their cabin. Brittany provided this commentary: "We have bears in our cars. They can open the doors. We didn't know that. Their in our cars." The country music wife then asked her followers for "one moment" as the party appeared to move outside to further investigate. While the bears were still rummaging around in the vehicle, the Aldean family stepped outside (or at least opened the door) to get a better look at the bruins in action. In the video posted to Brittany's story, you can hear the group trying to figure out whose car the bear was climbing through. In the midst of their discussion, a bear cub could be seen climbing onto the passenger seat, and then down and out of the vehicle. Some wise counsel stated that the "mama bear" must be near, so it would be best for them to go back into the safety of the indoors. So that's what they did, but not before Brittany was able to capture this image of a bear cub guilty of breaking-and-entering: Now what could have provoked those bears to break into those cars? Well, the usual suspect - or reason for bruins to bust into cars - is food. Bears tend to be pretty nosy creatures, and though they have been known to get violent when provoked (or if their cubs are messed with), they usually just get into a little mischief here and there. And sometimes that means getting into a little trouble for the sake of an easy meal. Brittany revealed in another video uploaded to her story that food was the culprit: "Okay update, if you care. It looks like there is two cubs and a mama. They have ransacked three big cars. A truck and two Tahoes. They are not scared and they know how to open the doors! I've never seen anything like it. This is wild. So night one of our family trip is very interesting. There's food and stuff out there scattered everywhere. I guess we just didn't think about keeping snacks in there." The two cubs and mother did some damage, and apparently got full off of whatever was in the vehicles outside of the Aldean cabin. They'll now know that you cannot, under any circumstance, leave food in a vehicle in an area where hungry bears might be roaming. Brittany later shared a piece of evidence that was recovered after the bears had moved on. One of them cracked into a Ghost energy drink, and she presumed that one of them likely "had the zoomies" because of it: Let this be a lesson to keep your car locked (like everything else has to be) when you are in staying in a place that bears also call home. If you don’t, then you’re kind of asking for a bear to break into your vehicle - as the Aldeans found out on the very first night of their Gatlinburg vacation.

Politics The Return of the Populist Deficit Hawk Donald Trump has some fine political models to draw on if he’s serious about fiscal responsibility. (Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock) Ross Perot was in many ways a precursor to President-elect Donald Trump. Perot was viewed as a credible presidential candidate despite never having previously held or even run for office because of his vast business holdings and management experience. Perot even promised to run the federal government like a business, promising a less “adversarial” and more “intelligent” relationship between government and business. Despite his considerable wealth, Perot campaigned as a populist in the tradition of William Jennings Bryan. The Texas billionaire warned of the “giant sucking sound” jobs would make after they flowed out of the United States in the wake of a free-trade agreement with Mexico. Perot wanted to curtail illegal immigration. He wanted an interventionist bipartisan establishment to turn its focus inward, saying his “highest foreign policy priority is to get our house in order and make America work again.” There are two major differences between Trump and Perot. The first, and most obvious, is that while Perot ran as an independent in 1992 and tried to start a lasting third-party movement as the Reform Party presidential nominee in 1996, Trump has conducted a—some would say hostile—takeover of the Republican Party. Trump was the Republican nominee in three straight presidential elections, winning two of them. The second is the centrality of the federal budget deficit as a Perot campaign issue. Conservatives were starting to debate the old Reaganite consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy as both the Cold War and Ronald Reagan’s chosen successor’s first term came to an end. But the deficit and national debt were ballooning after 12 years of Republican administrations. If there was one area where these presidents had violated the Reaganite consensus itself, it was the deficit. This led to both populist and centrist revolts against the GOP by 1992. Paul Tsongas ran on a platform of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility in the Democratic primaries, while being a conventional liberal in other respects (some Democrats feared at that time growing interest payments on the debt would eventually crowd out spending on social welfare programs). Jerry Brown ran to Bill Clinton’s populist left, but sought to impose a 13 percent flat tax. Pat Buchanan ran to George H.W. Bush’s right on both taxes (the 41st president had broken his 1988 “read my lips” pledge against raising taxes) and spending in the Republican primaries.  Trump has at times criticized how the federal government mismanages money, especially under the leadership of his Democratic opponents. He has at times made vague promises to cut that spending and appointed strong fiscal conservatives to oversee the budgetary process within his own administrations. Mick Mulvaney was hailed as the “most fiscally conservative budget director in decades” in 2017 and Russ Vought boasts a similar reputation now. Some Republican lawmakers had hoped for a renewed focus on fiscal discipline in a second Trump term, whether that took place four years ago or now. But overall, Trump hasn’t been a true believer in balanced budgets. He won in 2016 and 2024 in part because he largely eschewed Paul Ryan-style entitlement reforms. He has vowed not to cut Social Security or Medicare, which will make it difficult for him to get a handle on two of the biggest drivers of long-term debt. While he sought to repeal Obamacare in his first term, there was never a guarantee he would back a more austere replacement and is now noncommittal about repeal as his second term approaches. Under Trump, like most recent Republican presidents, there have been more tax cuts than spending cuts. This year, Trump ran on tax cuts that were less geared to upper income earners, such as no taxes on tips, but also less likely to recoup lost revenue by standard supply-side means. Trump presided over massive pandemic spending and deficits, largely rebuffing those who wanted to rein it all in before the lockdowns were lifted fully.  Then came DOGE. That would be the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump task force to take on bloated federal spending and the administrative state, run by the incoming president’s top ally Elon Musk and his mini-me of the 2024 presidential primaries, Vivek Ramaswamy. While both men are difficult to classify ideologically over the fullness of time, currently the pair of entrepreneurs are arguably the two biggest techno-libertarians within Trump’s inner circle. We have seen similar projects in the past, ranging from the Grace Commission under Reagan to Al Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative under Bill Clinton. Many of them have done good work. But Musk has said he intends to cut $2 trillion out of the gargantuan $6.75 trillion budget, reductions that would in theory go way past waste, fraud, and abuse. “A band of small-government revolutionaries will save our nation,” Ramaswmy vowed. Musk, for his part, said he is bent on “ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration.” Trump has never been much of a small-government revolutionary, maniacally dedicated or otherwise. Some would argue he has run away from that tendency of Ronald Reagan’s as much as Reagan distanced himself in much the same way from Barry Goldwater. That in turn, the argument goes, is why Reagan won in two landslides while Goldwater lost in one and Trump won the presidency 20 years after Reagan’s death. At the same time, Trump first seriously considered a national campaign within Perot’s Reform Party in 1999. Paradoxically, Trump’s short-lived Reform campaign was part of a factional fight to prevent a Perot-Buchanan alliance from taking party leadership away from its most successful elected official, Jesse Ventura, who was then governor of Minnesota. But Trump’s mixture of moderate business Republicanism with economic nationalism seemed like a fit for Perot’s movement. Trump’s more serious national political aspirations came during the Tea Party movement of the 2010s. While he initially represented its flirtations with hyperpartisanship and conspiracy theories (Trump was a big part of birtherism) more than its fusion of libertarianism and constitutional conservatism with populism and Middle American Radicalism, it was then that the real-estate developer–turned–reality-TV star was first regularly spoken of as a possible presidential candidate. Before being sidetracked by Covid-19, deregulation, tax cuts, and Obamacare repeal were among the top domestic policy priorities of Trump’s first term. As he ran for a return to the White House this year, Trump openly talked about replacing the income tax with tariffs. That would imply a much smaller federal government, as existed when Washington’s ambitions were last so funded. While seeking to emulate Grover Cleveland by serving nonconsecutive presidential terms, Trump held up William McKinley as his economic model. Trump also spoke at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, sought their presidential nomination, and, failing that, appealed for their votes. How successful this was is hard to measure. But the actual LP presidential nominee received fewer than 1 million votes for the first time since 2008, running a distant fifth place nationally. Trump became the first Republican nominee to win the national popular vote since 2004. Ballot access played a role in this, but it stands to reason that Trump got a large share of Libertarian—to say nothing of libertarian—votes as part of a broader anti-establishment coalition that also includes ex-Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. Most importantly, Trump won the election in no small part due to inflation hitting a 41-year high under President Joe Biden. While Trump is not blameless in the inflationary spending that took place since the pandemic, only Biden pushed an additional stimulus package after multiple others had already been enacted and, critically, as Americans were returning to work with the worst business closures behind them. Trump thus ran against inflationary spending practices this year and has now seen how excessive expenditures can hurt voters even without being paid for by broad-based tax increases. Argentina’s President Javier Milei was the first international leader to appear with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after the latter’s November victory, not Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Ramaswamy and Musk could draw heavily from Milei’s example in trying to take a scalpel to the government while being animated by populism. There are other, more libertarian models for a second Trump administration to follow. There are less libertarian ones too, and closer to home. Perot may have run long informercials showing charts about deficit spending and the national debt, a way around the mainstream media and nightly news before podcasts existed or the internet was widespread, but he was a deficit hawk, but not really a libertarian. Perot at times championed a more ambitious national health insurance program even as he promised to wipe away Washington’s red ink. Like Musk, he had made some of his billions from government contracts. He wanted to get the debt and deficits under control, but he was no small-government revolutionary himself. He was willing to rely on tax increases as well as spending cuts, and not all his cuts were targeted at popular social welfare programs.  Unlike Trump, however, Perot never had to actually govern. In fact, he never needed to appeal to an electoral coalition that drew more than 19 percent of the vote. But he had an impact on both parties, some of which can still be felt with Trump. And Trump is constitutionally ineligible to seek another term in 2028, giving him the luxury of making tough choices that eluded him from to 2017 to 2021 and have posed a problem for many of his predecessors. Yet Trump has faced harsh criticism when he has deviated from his more government-friendly populism in the past. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was a major Democratic target throughout the presidential campaign. Democrats from Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned as if Trump was lying about not wanting to cut Social Security or Medicare. “We have a nominee whose ideology is in direct contrast to what President Trump ran on. President Trump told working people and seniors he would not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in 2017, when Mulvaney was tapped as budget director. “Yet you have a nominee who prides himself, who is a deficit hawk, who has said over and over again that he will do exactly the opposite of what President Trump campaigned on.” Sanders had offered to work with Trump on infrastructure and other projects back then. He has floated collaborating with Trump on capping credit card interest rates this time around. But he will surely be open to campaigning against Musk and Ramaswamy instead. It’s no accident that Musk and Ramaswamy were not chosen for jobs that require Senate confirmation, a risk Trump was briefly even willing to take for Matt Gaetz. DOGE, notwithstanding its official-sounding name, is not a real Cabinet-level department and requires no act of Congress to create.  Spending cuts of any size could always stunt Trump’s political momentum, as budget fights have done for Republicans before. But there is a basic arithmetic that cannot be denied forever. And Trump has the opportunity to keep rebuilding the GOP coalition. The federal budget is now bigger than the national debt was when Perot started running on the issue. The deficit is bigger than the federal budget was when Perot first began warning it was unsustainable. Can DOGE, created by an actual populist president, finally deliver on the promises of the old Perot campaigns? The post The Return of the Populist Deficit Hawk appeared first on The American Conservative.

Magazines The Future (Anthony Quintano/Wikimedia Commons) In the 2015 movie Hail, Caesar!, a conspiracy of communist screenwriters sets out to undermine the capitalist system with a program of kidnapping, sub rosa propaganda, and dialectics. The plotters refer to their study group–cum–crime ring as “The Future.”  Here at The American Conservative, we have only limited use for communists, let alone screenwriters, but we do take a strong interest in the future. The American people issued a mandate for change on November 5; how can the new administration deliver on it? Can the new administration deliver on it? These are the central questions of many of the pieces in this issue. Drew Holden writes about one paradigm for a fresh national program, the “abundance agenda,” and asks the question: Is “more” for its own sake necessarily an improvement? Phillip Linderman takes a look at the concrete steps the new administration can take to take the State Department and American diplomacy out of the hands of unaccountable technocrats. Andrew Bring examines the tools to set American trade policy on the right track, particularly everyone’s favorite: the tariff. The American Conservative’s own Curt Mills reads the tea leaves of the new administration’s personnel appointments, while the irrepressible Sumantra Maitra sits down for an interview with one-half of the brain trust behind the Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy. Of course, talking about the future often requires expeditions into the past, both recent and far-off. In our cover story, Ryan Girdusky dissects Donald Trump’s electoral victory to see whether there is a durable coalition to be found in it. Joseph Addington, TAC’s ISI fellow, makes his print debut with a survey of Javier Milei’s whirlwind transformation of Argentina’s government and economy. Abiy Ahmed also set out to transform a nation, his own Ethiopia, and succeeded in a dark way. Brad Pearce examines how the self-described “Bay area kind of guy” ushered in an era of ethnic balkanization and state collapse.  The future often recapitulates what has gone before: It has often been said, but that makes it no less true. This is the judgment that emerges from Rob York’s outline of the recurring themes of Russia’s relationship with North Korea; also from the look TAC’s political editor, Spencer Neale, takes at Ridley Scott’s “then as farce” sequel to Gladiator. But the past is not solely a dataset to be mined for actionable insights; it also provides its own pleasures. Peter Tonguette reviews a memoir of the cause celebre of yesteryear, the Brooke Astor trial, and finds many delightful portraits from the twilight of New York’s old high society. No less delightfully, one of our esteemed founders, Taki Theodoracopulos, returns to our pages with a tribute to our learned friend R. Emmett Tyrrell, the founder of the American Spectator. Welcome back, Taki. The post The Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Seventy-seven Nobel laureates signed a letter urging the Senate to oppose the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), The New York Times reported Monday. In the letter, the 77 Nobel laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics said they have concerns about Kennedy’s lack of “relevant experience” and about some of the public positions he has taken. “In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine,...

A terrorism trial began on Monday for a Virginia man accused of supporting the Islamic State. Mohammed Chhipa, 35, of Springfield, Virginia, is accused of sending tens of thousands of dollars to the Islamic State group. During opening statements on Monday, a defense attorney described Chhipa as a lonely individual seeking a wife who was targeted by relentless FBI sting operations, including one undercover agent who posed as a potential bride. Meanwhile, prosecutors at the trial in a U.S....

NEW DELHI, Dec 10 (Reuters) - India's plans to ramp up coal-powered steelmaking capacity could impede the country's goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2070, Global Energy Monitor (GEM) said in a report on Tuesday. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set 2070 as the target for achieving net zero emissions, two decades later than what scientists recommend to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. But a push to produce more steel to meet rising demand driven by India's rapid economic growth...

Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, emphasized the importance of Republican senators uniting to confirm President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet nominees without delay, highlighting their alignment with Trump's "America First" mandate during an appearance on Newsmax on Monday. Rep. Cloud urged Senate Republicans to quickly confirm the President-elect's cabinet nominees, criticizing past approval of Biden administration officials while calling for decisive support of Trump's appointees. Appearing Monday...

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the first female combat veteran elected to the Senate and a member of the Armed Services Committee, has signaled toward supporting President-elect Trump's nominee for defense secretary.After meeting on Monday for a second time with Pete Hegseth, Ernst wrote in a statement that "as I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources."An Army National Guard officer who deployed to the wars in Afghanistan...

China’s escalating conflict with the US over trade is now extending to drones that have become a vital part of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s war. Chinese manufacturers are said to have recently begun limiting sales to the US and Europe of key components used to build unmanned aerial vehicles. The moves are said to be a prelude to broader export restrictions on drone parts that western officials expect Beijing to enforce in the new year. China also has opened a probe into Nvidia over...