William Finn, Tony-Winning Composer for ‘Falsettos,’ Dies at 73
An acclaimed musical theater writer, he won for both his score and his book and later had a huge hit with “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”
What Would It Take to Destroy the United States?
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 for The Daily Signal. I was looking at the news this week and I thought of an experiment. What if you really wanted to destroy the United States? What if you’d had ill intention for America? What would you do? What agenda would you pursue?
And then I started thinking of civilizations. What was the stuff of civilizations that made them work? And it’s basic: their borders, their finances, their unity, their fuel, their food. So, if you really wanted to, in civilizational terms, destroy the United States, the first thing I would do if I were an enemy of the United States is I would destroy the borders.
In other words, I would just let anybody come across our version of the Rhine or the Danube, as they happened in fifth century. And that’s pretty much what we have done the last 40 years, but particularly, the last four years.
We talked about comprehensive immigration reform as needed to stop the influx, but President Donald Trump , before the Biden administration and after the Biden administration , had no such recourse. He just simply stopped it, temporarily. And he has now.
But what was behind all that? Former President Joe Biden , apparently, thought that if he let in 12 million people, without audits or background checks—would it alter the demography? Would it give him new constituencies for big government? What was the thinking about it?
But it’s caused billions of dollars in increased expenses. It’s really damaged the inner city. It’s damaged the Rio Grande Valley. It’s damaged the San Joaquin Valley. We have all of this crime spike. Was it deliberate?
If you also wanted to hurt the United States, you know what I would do if I had nefarious intent? I would keep printing money. And I would call that, in fact, “Build Back Better.” And the more inflationary it got, I would say it was going to be the “Inflationary Reduction Act.” And in that process, I would borrow maybe $7 trillion within four years, maybe $8 trillion, and add to an existing $38 trillion in national debt, $37 trillion, so that the interest per day would be $3 billion. That would really hurt the United States.
You know what I’d also do? If I looked at the United States and I said, “Oh my gosh, they’ve got almost limitless supplies of natural gas, they’ve got almost more coal than any European country, they’ve got all of this oil. They once had a vibrant—they were the nuclear energy, they were the founders of nuclear power. They have all these dams of hydroelectric,” I know what I’ll do. I will castigate all of that and say it makes either the environment too hot, global warming, or it ruins the natural landscape with dams. Or it will kill us all through radiation.
Whatever particular complaint I’d have, I would stop it as much as I could. Dismantle nuclear power plants. Cut back on natural gas. Stop full drilling, fracking. Blow up dams rather than build them. And I’m talking about California, for example, where the result would be 40 cents a kilowatt. Would make it unaffordable. That way, if you did all of that, a quarter of all the people who paid their power bills would default. And that model would sweep across the United States.
The third thing that I would do—and I think it’s besides debt and borders and fuel—I would sow disunity. And I would say that the content of our character is not as important as the color of our skin. And I would go back and reinterpret all of the hard-won progress of the civil rights movement and sort of get rid of it.
I would just say the color of our skin matters more than anything and so we’re going to hire on the basis of superficial appearance. We’re gonna have reparations to go back eight generations and adjudicate who might have had an ancestor that owned a slave and who didn’t. And then I would say I’m gonna predicate graduations, dorms—who gets to go into a dorm, who gets to go into a library, a safe space—oh, on the basis of race. But I’m not gonna call it racism or segregation. I’m gonna call it diversity, equity, and inclusion and mainstream it.
If I also wanted to create disunity, I would just say, from now on, after 7,000 years of civilization, there are three sexes, not two. And women’s sports must include biological males. Not that it was an important topic, but it would create enormous tension and disunity.
What am I getting at? It seems to me that in the last four years, if you had an agenda that was designed to hurt the United States, in terms of an influx of 12 million foreigners that were unaudited, an unprotected border, a repression on energy, a desire to print money rather than to cut expenses and save money and go toward a balanced budget, and a way to divide the people—if you wanted to do all that, you couldn’t have done a better job than what we have seen from 2021 to 2025.
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Florida to execute man convicted of killing woman he abducted
Michael Tanzi is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at Florida state prison for killing Janet Acosta in 2000
A man convicted of killing a woman who was carjacked on her lunch break from her job at the Miami Herald is set to be executed Tuesday evening.
Michael Tanzi was scheduled to receive a lethal injection at Florida state prison for the 2000 abduction and strangling of Janet Acosta. A production worker at the South Florida paper, Acosta was beaten, robbed, driven to the Florida Keys and then strangled and her body left on an island.
Sky News Press Preview | Tuesday 8 April 2025
Council opens door for Waukegan sports bar to reopen; ‘A road map for how we circumvent our ordinances’
Closed since Dec. 13 because of code and licensing questions, La Cantina will have the opportunity to reopen its Washington Street location in Waukegan as soon as its paperwork is in order and it passes the required inspections.
Though Edwin Lagunas opened La Cantina, a sports bar, in July 2022, following guidance from city inspectors, in December the city posted a notice ordering him to close. He later had to obtain a liquor license, which was denied on March 18 because of a previous DUI conviction.
As Lagunas worked with city officials to find a path to reopen La Cantina, he ceded management of the restaurant to his wife, Maria Garcia, and she applied for the liquor license which required approval by the City Council.
The Waukegan City Council voted 6-3 to grant a liquor license to Toluca’s Restaurant and Cantina — which does business as La Cantina — Monday at City Hall after Lagunas and Garcia persuaded a majority of the members that they had met the requirements to operate.
During a meeting of the council’s Community Development Committee on Monday before the council meeting, Garcia told the five-member panel through an interpreter that she is going to be both the liquor license holder and the manager. Lagunas will handle the marketing, she said.
Located immediately east of Toluca’s Restaurant on Washington Avenue, a longtime Waukegan eatery owned by Lagunas’ father, Lagunas said he followed city officials’ guidance on how to operate La Cantina. That advice later led to the December closing.
When García was questioned at the committee meeting about the previous events, Stewart Weiss, an attorney with corporation counsel Elrod Friedman, said the previous situation was remedied as the parties worked together to find a solution.
“Toluca’s received a citation for their business license, not their liquor license, that they were doing business in the adjacent area,” Weiss said. “They paid a fine. We did not have any issues of noncompliance after that.”
During the council meeting, Ald. Thomas Hayes, 9th Ward, questioned perceived inconsistencies and wanted to know whether a nightclub endorsement was to be included with the license. The resolution was amended to include the endorsement.
Hayes was one of the three council members opposing the resolution. He said the substitution of the license applicant and management responsibilities sends the wrong message to the community. It shows a legal loophole was the solution to a problem, he said.
“What we did was publish a road map for how we circumvent our ordinances,” Hayes said. “We accepted an application from an individual who was not able to have a liquor license, and that application was blatantly withdrawn. His wife was then put on the application.”
Ald. Jose A. Guzman, 2nd Ward, who voted for the license, questioned the law disallowing a person with a DUI conviction from having a liquor license. Weiss said the prohibition was part of the city’s liquor ordinance. Guzman said he did not think it was important enough to be a barrier.
Ald. Lynn Florian, who opposed the resolution, countered Guzman’s suggestion that people with a DUI conviction should not be prohibited from holding a liquor license.
“It’s very important,” Florian said. “When you have a liquor license, one of the things you have to do is not overserve your customers. If you have a DUI, you have overserved yourself, gotten in a vehicle and put hundreds of people, maybe more, at risk by driving drunk.”
With the liquor license approved and the nightclub endorsement needed, mayoral Chief of Staff George Bridges Jr. said after the meeting that steps to reopening remain. The license should be granted quickly, but the endorsement requires more.
“The building inspector and the fire marshal have to make an inspection for the nightclub endorsement,” Bridges said. “Once they pass the inspections and get the endorsement, they can open.”
Joining Guzman voting for the resolution were Ald. Sylvia Sims Bolton, 1st Ward, Ald Juan Martinez, 3rd Ward, Ald. Victor Felix, 4th Ward. Ald. Keith Turner, 6th Ward, and Ald. Michael Donnenwirth, 7th Ward.
Ald. Edith Newsome, 5th Ward, joined Florian and Hayes in voting no.