Here we go again.

Another expensive lesson in what happens when political ambition outruns engineering reality — this time playing out in the dead of winter in Burlington, Vermont.

Electric buses may perform adequately in mild environments, but expecting them to replace diesel buses in northern states with long, cold winters ignores basic physics.

Electric buses unveiled with great fanfare as symbols of progress and climate virtue are now sitting idle in the snow, while the supposedly outdated diesel fleet does the actual work of moving people. Taxpayers paid millions for these vehicles, and right now, they can’t do the job they were purchased to do.

Green Mountain Transit added five new electric buses to its fleet last year, announcing the move in the warmth of summer. Officials praised the decision as a major step toward Burlington’s net-zero energy goals and reduced carbon emissions. The buses were billed as modern, clean, and capable, each equipped with a 520-kilowatt-hour battery and a theoretical range of up to 258 miles on a single charge.

So much for theory. This year’s harsh winter has delivered a lesson in reality.

Out cold

Less than a year after entering service, all five electric buses were pulled from operation following a battery recall by manufacturer New Flyer Industries. The recall cited a potential fire hazard and prompted a software update that significantly restricted how the buses could be charged. Under the revised settings, the buses are no longer allowed to charge when battery temperatures fall below 41 degrees Fahrenheit, and charging capacity is capped at 75%.

Those restrictions created an immediate operational problem. Green Mountain Transit’s garage does not have the fire-mitigation equipment required to store or charge electric buses indoors under the recall conditions. As a result, the buses have been forced to remain outdoors, exposed to Vermont’s winter temperatures. With ambient temperatures frequently below the charging threshold, the buses cannot be charged safely and therefore cannot be used.

Perverse incentives

While Green Mountain Transit general manager Clayton Clark noted that the charging restriction is software-based and could theoretically be resolved sooner, no such remedy has yet been implemented; replacement batteries will not be installed for 18 to 24 months. Clark said GMT is seeking a financial remedy from the manufacturer and has not ruled out litigation.

The problem is compounded by how the buses were acquired in the first place, explained Clark. Federal transit grants from 2020 through 2024 prioritized low- or zero-emission vehicles, with requests for diesel buses often denied. To remain competitive for funding, Green Mountain Transit pursued electric buses, which are approximately 90% funded through federal grants and Volkswagen settlement money. Canceling the electric-bus grant would mean forfeiting those funds entirely, without the option to redirect them toward diesel replacements.

The price tag for this experiment? A cool $8 million.

Stretched thin

The five recalled buses represent about 10% of Green Mountain Transit’s fleet. With all of them sidelined, Clark said the system is now “literally down to our last bus,” forcing occasional service cancellations. Replacement buses cannot be ordered quickly; new transit vehicles require multi-year lead times and federal approvals. In the meantime, the diesel buses that were slated for retirement are being run harder than ever to keep service operating.

This is not a story about careless drivers or mismanagement by local transit employees. It is about a policy framework that rewards electrification on paper while leaving transit agencies exposed when technology, climate, and infrastructure fail to align.

Electric buses may perform adequately in mild environments, but expecting them to replace diesel buses in northern states with long, cold winters ignores basic physics. Batteries lose efficiency in cold weather. Charging becomes slower and more fragile. Range drops. Reliability suffers.

RELATED: This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will

Photo by Guo Haipeng/VCG via Getty Images

Win diesel

By comparison, a conventional diesel bus typically has nearly three times the range and can be refueled in minutes rather than hours. Once fueled, it can return immediately to service and run hundreds of additional miles without interruption. That is not ideology. It is an operational fact. Public transit systems exist to provide reliable service — especially in harsh conditions — not to serve as test beds for political signaling.

Supporters of these programs frame them as necessary sacrifices in the fight against climate change, but the cost-benefit analysis rarely receives serious scrutiny. The emissions reductions claimed at the local level are negligible in a global context, while the financial burden on taxpayers is real and long-lasting. Millions of dollars have been spent on buses that are currently unusable, and residents are left paying for both the electric fleet and the diesel backup required to keep the system functioning.

What makes this situation particularly troubling is how familiar it has become. Cold-weather failures of electric buses have been reported repeatedly across northern regions, yet each new purchase is announced as if the technology has suddenly overcome its limitations. The lessons of previous winters are ignored, only to be relearned at significant public expense.

In the middle of winter, Burlington’s transit system depends on the very diesel buses officials were eager to replace, while millions of dollars’ worth of electric buses sit frozen and unused. When temperatures drop, physics doesn’t negotiate. And this winter in Burlington, the only buses that work are the ones officials tried to phase out.

​Green mountain transit, Electric buses, New flyer, Public transportation, Winter, Lifestyle, Ev mandate, Align cars 

A man described as a “dumb crook” by police allegedly claimed that a dog chased him into a van, but surveillance video showed that he was trying to steal items inside.

Dean Young, 26, can be heard screaming from inside the van on the surveillance video from the Hialeah neighborhood on Wednesday.

‘I think it’s funny. It’s a dumb crook. I guess now he’s watching the news and inside the jail.’

Young began screaming and kicking at the doors after the owner of the van locked the doors.

“Help me! I’m inside!” the man yells. “I can’t breathe!”

The owner of the van decided to wait until police arrived out of safety concerns, according to homeowner Nercy Toledo.

“There were machetes inside the truck, and he could’ve just come out and hurt anybody, so they left him in there,” she explained.

Young tried to tell police that he was handing out business cards and was chased into the van by a dog, but surveillance video obtained by WTVJ-TV showed him sneaking up to the van after exiting his car.

“I think it’s funny. It’s a dumb crook. I guess now he’s watching the news and inside the jail,” Toledo added.

RELATED: 19-year-old drove for 22 hours straight to kidnap 2 underage girls he met on Roblox game, police say

Young faces burglary and criminal mischief charges.

He was given a bond of $1,500 but will remain in jail.

“The Hialeah Police Department was really happy ’cause this is incredible. This is the best arrest they’ve ever made, they told me,” Toledo told WSVN-TV.

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​Hialeah arrest florida, Dumb crooks, Van thief locked inside, Crime, Dean young arrest 

America’s 250th anniversary is defined by one undeniable fact: Both sides of the aisle are in open revolt against elites. Nothing would make the founders more proud. They created this country through their own act of rebellion against an out-of-touch ruling class. But it’s far from clear whether today’s elites will be fully defeated — or if the country is doomed to suffer under another self-serving class.

Only one of these revolts will ultimately be good for the American people — and the wrong one has the momentum.

On the right, at least, the revolt has been under way for a decade. Before 2016, Republican voters had repeatedly backed go-along-to-get-along politicians — the Romneys, McCains, and Bushes of the world. In return, they got mountains of debt and deficit spending, multiple unwinnable wars, and massive expansions in the size and power of government. Rather than clean up the country’s messes, the GOP elite made them worse.

Out of sheer frustration, Republicans turned against their ruling class, throwing their support behind Donald Trump. He has since demolished the GOP establishment. While the Trump revolution is still under way in policy, on the political front, it’s over. The old Republican elite is never coming back.

Then there’s the open revolt on the left. Like the frustrated Republicans of a decade ago, today’s Democrats are furious at their elected officials for the lack of change. But whereas the right is fighting to return quintessential American values to the fore, these leftists want to ditch those values altogether. Their vision can be summed up in one word: socialism.

Hence the stunning victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, the rising star of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, and socialist candidates in congressional primaries. And hence the deluge of socialist activists coming out of college campuses. They’re sick and tired of Democrat elites who don’t do anything with their power. They’re determined to seize that power for themselves.

Say this for the current anti-elite moment: It’s beautifully American. Both the right and left are breathing new life into our national ideal of sovereignty, which holds that the people are ultimately in control. It’s good to remind ourselves — and our would-be rulers — that we the people are still in charge.

But not all revolts are created equal. Despite their superficial similarity, the Republican and Democrat visions are diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible. At the end of the day, the right is trying to permanently give power back to the people. The left, on the other hand, is setting the stage to create a permanent — and much worse — ruling class.

The difference between these two revolts is clear in the kinds of policies they back. On the right, Republicans from Donald Trump down are fighting to gut unelected bureaucracies, give families the funding to choose their children’s education, and slash red tape to unleash small businesses and job creation. Their immigration crackdown is also rooted in sovereignty, rolling back the blatant attempts to prop up ruling class power by bringing in foreign voters. On issue after issue, Republicans are taking power from elites and giving it to the people.

RELATED: We escaped King George. Why do we bow to King Judge?

Photo by Pierce Archive LLC/Buyenlarge via Getty Images

The socialist wave is rushing in the opposite direction. Today’s leftists want government control over every facet of the economy, vast expansions of the welfare state, and unprecedented power in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. As history attests, socialism creates a ruling class that runs roughshod over everyone else, since absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Only one of these revolts will ultimately be good for the American people — and the wrong one has the momentum. Democratic socialists are surging in local, state, and national elections, while Republicans are doubting themselves instead of doubling down on their agenda.

Republicans are also wondering if their revolt can survive once Trump leaves office. But they should be working to ensure that it does, rallying around leaders who will keep taking the fight to our would-be overlords. In this time of revolt, there’s no guarantee of who will win. But the same was true 250 years ago, at America’s birth. The battle then was very much between the revolutionaries who stood for the people and those who stood for the elites. The founders led their fellow Americans to cast off the shackles of that ruling class. Now Republicans must rally the people once again to ensure another 250 years of sovereignty and national success.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Democrats, Republicans, Trump, Midterms, Ruling class, Elites, Gop, America 250, Socialism, Opinion & analysis 

Seven recently uncovered pages from Richard Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony indicate that the former president was undone by a coup d’état contrived by the deep state, a theory previously argued by Tucker Carlson and Roger Stone.

In June 1975, Nixon testified before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and a couple of members of a federal grand jury. A portion of Nixon’s 297-page transcribed testimony was previously sealed, considered too incendiary to share with the rest of the grand jury. While most of the transcript was released by the National Archives in 2011, a seven-page segment remained withheld.

‘The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own.’

Last week, the New York Times published a guest op-ed from reporter James Rosen detailing the contents of those seven pages for the first time.

The newly uncovered portions of Nixon’s testimony revealed that he became aware in December 1971 that Navy Yeoman Charles Radford had secretly copied roughly 5,000 classified National Security Council documents, including documents nabbed from the briefcase of Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser. Radford then shared those documents with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Kissinger went on to become Nixon’s secretary of state in 1973.

“Yoeman Radford was Kissinger’s top notetaker. He had been with Kissinger on his secret trip to Paris when we were trying to end the war. He had been on all of those trips and had been the notetaker and knew what Kissinger had said and what the other side had said,” Nixon testified.

He stated that Radford “broke down” when he was given a polygraph.

“He cried … and virtually admitted his guilt,” Nixon said.

“The reason that we couldn’t prosecute and wouldn’t was that if we did, he then would expose and could expose these highly confidential exchanges we were having to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion,” Nixon explained.

RELATED: Biden FBI’s Arctic Frost surveillance of lawmakers could cost the government, thanks to ‘real teeth’ measure in funding bill

Photo by the White House Photo Office/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Nixon believed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed his foreign policy, including his goal of ending the Vietnam War, and Radford’s spying might undermine and sabotage these policies.

Nixon’s testimony revealed that he had initially wanted to pursue charges against those involved in the spying efforts, but ultimately chose not to publicize the incident to protect sensitive operations and the military’s reputation.

He called it a “can of worms” that was not worth opening, urging prosecutors not to probe the affair deeply. Prosecutors agreed.

“The Joint Chiefs’ spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times,” Rosen wrote. “The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state.'”

The pages unearthed by Rosen support previous claims from Carlson and Stone that Nixon was the target of a successful coup attempt from deep-state actors.

RELATED: Watergate was amateur hour compared to Arctic Frost

Photo by Bettmann / Contributor /Getty Images

“He was the most popular president, by votes, which is the only way we can measure, in his re-election campaign. And two years later, he’s gone, undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI, and a bunch of CIA employees,” Carlson stated during an April 2024 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

During an August 2024 episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show,” he said, “In retrospect, it looks very much like a kind of coup against a sitting and enormously popular president.”

Stone previously wrote two books discussing the coup against Nixon, “Nixon’s Secrets” in 2014 and “Tricky Dick” in 2017.

“Basically, [what] you have here is the deep state, which Nixon’s testimony now proves exists, spying on Richard Nixon for the same reasons that they spied on Donald Trump. For the same reasons they invented the Russian collusion hoax as their rationale for the FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his aides,” Stone stated during a Sunday episode of his podcast, “The Roger Stone Show.”

Stone referred to the takedown of Nixon as a “government-engineered coup d’état.”

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​News, Tucker carlson, Roger stone, Richard nixon, Nixon, Cia, Fbi, Watergate, Charles radford, Henry kissinger, Deep state, Coup, Politics 

Not that long ago, people who struggled to accept their biological gender were diagnosed with a mental health disorder called gender dysphoria. But radical tolerance pushed by the left has ushered us into an age where transgenderism is so embraced, and even popularized, that advocacy for it continues even as transgender-perpetrated violence increases.

On February 10, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a biological male who identified as a woman, allegedly carried out a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, killing eight people — including his mother, stepbrother, five students, and a teacher — before dying by suicide. The mass shooting is one of the deadliest in Canadian history.

The mainstream media, however, has consistently portrayed Van Rootselaar as a woman with mental health issues, seemingly aligning with the transgender movement’s emphasis on gender-affirming language and self-identification.

But BlazeTV host Rick Burgess argues that mental illness isn’t the full picture.

“A[n alleged] mass killer that then takes their own life — that is a calling card of demonic activity,” he says.

On this episode of “Strange Encounters,” Rick delves into the spiritual dimensions of the atrocity, arguing that what society calls “mental illness” in such cases may actually stem from demonic oppression fueled by cultural confusion over God’s design for gender.

“On this podcast, we do not believe that all mental health is demonic. There’s no doubt that the human brain is a piece of our fallen bodies, like everything else, and it can be sick,” Rick says.

“However, there’s also a clear indication that many times we label demonic activity as mental illness when it’s not,” he adds.

Much of the violence we’re seeing from trans-identifying individuals, he says, falls into that category: demonic oppression repackaged as mental illness.

The LGBTQ+ movement that insists gender is a broad spectrum instead of the male/female dichotomy created by God is creating an environment that is both “chaotic and confusing.”

“And what lives in those two worlds?” Rick asks. “Demonic activity. No question.”

“We’re just pretending something, and it’s costing people their lives — and I’m including the people who are struggling with this,” he adds. “They become dangerous to other people and dangerous to themselves.”

To hear more of Rick’s spiritual analysis, watch the episode above.

Want more from Rick Burgess?

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​Rick burgess, Strange encounters, Strange encounters with rick burgess, Spiritual warfare, Canada mass shooting, Transgender violence, Transgenderism, Tumbler ridge shooting, Jesse van rootselaar, Blazetv, Blaze media 

Anyone who has been a teenager for more than five minutes can probably reach the same conclusion after watching the flood of videos recently posted to social media. Many of the kids streaming out of school to take part in anti-ICE protests look less like committed activists and more like students thrilled to be out of class. You can see it written all over their faces.

Perhaps the plan is to destroy the current system before deciding what the new one should be.

But students who simply want to ditch class are not the ones coordinating nationwide demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most young people are not deeply invested in politics, if they are interested at all. Large-scale, coordinated walkouts don’t materialize organically.

Unfortunately, perception often becomes reality. Videos of tens of thousands of students leaving school buildings across the country are invaluable propaganda for left-wing activists seeking to foment cultural and political upheaval. This is not hyperbole. It comes directly from the far-left nonprofit organizations helping to organize, train, and mobilize K-12 students.

One such group is the Sunrise Movement, a far-left climate organization that has increasingly expanded beyond environmental activism. Originally focused on promoting a Green New Deal, the group recently announced it was pivoting toward “fighting Trump.” To accomplish this shift, Sunrise appears intent on eliminating opposition to its ideology by any means necessary. The organization has openly bragged about harassing hotel staff and guests for allegedly hosting ICE agents.

Central to Sunrise’s strategy is recruiting young people and embedding itself in K-12 schools. The organization sponsors clubs nationwide, which are then described as “student-led.” Unsurprisingly, these same clubs often organize walkouts centered on climate activism and anti-Trump messaging.

These protests are not meant to be one-off events. According to training materials obtained by Defending Education, Sunrise calls for monthly “direct actions” designed to “disrupt business as usual” and advance a so-called political revolution. The group’s 25-page guidebook — riddled with tired Marxist clichés — explicitly urges minors to engage in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions-style actions against businesses deemed to be “propping up ICE.”

The issue, in other words, is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.

Sunrise’s materials offer little clarity about what this revolution will actually achieve; perhaps the plan is to destroy the current system before deciding what the new one should be.

RELATED: When parents pay twice to escape public schools, the verdict is in

id-work / Getty Images

But these acts of “civil disobedience” have become less about expressions of student voices and more about spectacles of class-skipping that benefit activists who openly call for dismantling the very system that allows these protests to occur.

In 2018, Robert Pondiscio warned schools that refusing to enforce discipline for the Parkland gun-control walkouts would make them “regret it down the road.” If students are permitted to disrupt learning for one political cause, he argued, schools would have to refrain from punishing disruptions for any cause that follows.

Eight years later, that warning looks prescient. Parents, activists, and even school officials now routinely encourage or excuse walkouts tied to the cause of the month. Meanwhile, the activist groups behind these demonstrations are targeting businesses and institutions that fail to conform to prescribed political views. History suggests that once a movement normalizes coercion, its circle of targets inevitably expands.

It is time for parents, administrators, and school board members to put an end to mass student walkouts before they become a permanent feature of a school system that is already failing far too many children. Roughly 70% of American students are not proficient in core academic subjects. Schools cannot afford to treat instructional time as expendable.

Students absolutely retain their First Amendment rights. But they also have a civic responsibility to become educated citizens. Real, lasting change comes from knowledge, discipline, and understanding — not from performative outrage and adults who confuse activism with education.

​School walkouts, Sunrise movement, Ice protest, Ice, Immigration and customs enforcement, Students, Robert pondiscio, Boycott divestment and sanctions, Opinion & analysis