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April 2025

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Common Sense Is Highly Contagious — Except Among Dems

By on April 30th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/30/common-sense-is-highly-contagious-except-among-dems/

At a town hall meeting last week, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — one of the few moderate Democrats left in the world — made a perfectly common-sensical statement: “Americans believe that only U.S. citizens should be determining the outcome of American elections.”

She was greeted with a torrent shouts, boos, and profanity, signs that said “shame” from her constituents, and was ushered out of room for “security reasons.”

After President Donald Trump called for a “revolution of common sense,” it spread like a virus – except among Democrats, who appear to have a natural immunity.

Trump has been implementing his common-sense agenda at a breakneck speed, whether it’s restoring order at the border, protecting taxpayers from waste and fraud, insisting that foreign policy focus on what’s best for the U.S., dispensing with DEI, transgenderism, and other leftist projects that defy common sense, protecting parental rights.

The most important thing Trump has done, however, has been to make it safe again for everyday Americans to express common-sense views.

That illegal immigrants should be sent back to their home countries. That borders should be secure and streets safe. That it’s OK to buy reliable, affordable gas cars. That vast amounts of government spending is wasteful. That there are only two genders. That discrimination is never acceptable, no matter how you dress it up. That companies should focus on serving consumers, not anti-capitalist zealots. That violence for political ends is never justified.

Major corporations are rejecting DEI, now that it’s safe to admit what they knew all along – that it increased strife among workers, alienated customers, and didn’t help their bottom lines. Likewise, corporations are abandoning the uber-woke “environment, social, governance” investment ideology for the same reason.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

China’s Intent Is to Master AI and Fusion Power: It’s Not What They Say, It’s What They Are Doing by Lawrence Kadish

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21581/china-ai-fusion-power

There is an old adage many of us heard from our parents, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.”

So when China creates military equipment that demonstrates a growing skill at an amphibious invasion, it would be best to ignore their rhetoric and concentrate on what they are doing to create the skills, tactics and ability to invade that democratic bastion across the Taiwan Strait.

As students of history, the Communist giant’s rulers knows full well the difficulty of any invasion that comes from the sea. The British Commonwealth is still traumatized over their World War I amphibious assault on the Turkish Dardanelles Straits, which history records as Gallipoli Campaign. Bogged down on the beach, with Ottoman troops and artillery firing down on them, after months of stalemate, and over a half million casualties combined suffered by both sides, the Allies withdrew. Many New Zealand and Australian soldiers suffered, and memorials abound to their sacrifice.

The harsh lessons of Gallipoli were well understood during World War II, when the Allies faced the Nazi forces across the English Channel. It would be more than a year of planning, the creation of specialized equipment, the training of troops, and months of air strikes before any GI stepped ashore at Normandy on D-Day. Even then, on Omaha Beach, the sands ran red with the blood of Americans killed as they came ashore.

It is apparent the Chinese know full well the challenge of making good on their threat to take Taiwan by military force. The latest reports reveal their creation of sea-going barges with enormous crane-like bridges that can be lowered across mine strewn beaches. Satellite imagery suggests those barges could put ashore tanks as well as soldiers.

While President Donald Trump confronts China’s intent to master the 21st Century through their economic weapons and theft of intellectual property, it is important to recognize Beijing’s ongoing investment in their military capability. Combine this example of amphibious innovation with their construction of aircraft carriers, next-generation fighter jets, Pacific island military bases, and their intent to master artificial intelligence (AI) and nuclear fusion power, and it becomes obvious to all that it matters not what China says. It is what they are doing.

America needs to take notice and appreciate the challenge that faces all of us.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Spain’s big blackout came less than week after it went full green on electricity By Monica Showalter

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/spain_s_big_blackout_came_less_than_week_after_it_went_full_green_on_electricity.html

Spain and Portugal achieved net zero on Monday, but not the way anyone would want to achieve net zero: By going back to the cavepeople times with no electricity.

According to the New York Times:

A major power outage hit Spain and Portugal on Monday afternoon, abruptly shutting down daily activities, halting trains and subways, cutting off traffic lights, closing stores and canceling or delaying some flights.

Hours after the power shut off around 12:30 p.m. Central European time, stranding tens of millions of people across the Iberian Peninsula, officials remained at a loss as to the cause, though several denied any foul play.

“At this point, there are no indications of any cyberattack,” António Costa, the president of the European Council, wrote on X after communicating with the leaders of Spain and Portugal, who both assembled emergency meetings. “Grid operators in both countries are working on finding the cause and on restoring the electricity supply.”

Their whole society was disrupted, and no one knows exactly why as of yet.

According to Politico Europe:

The massive blackout that left the Iberian Peninsula in the dark on Monday appears to have been sparked by the unexplained disappearance 15 gigawatts of power from Spain’s electricity grid.

“This has never happened before,” said a grave-looking Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at a press conference late on Monday evening. “And what caused it is something that the experts have not yet established — but they will.”

He added that “no hypothesis has been rejected, and every possible cause is being investigated.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Ireland became a cauldron of the culture war Saturday’s protests for and against immigration perfectly captured the tensions of our time. Brendan O’Neill

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/28/how-ireland-became-a-cauldron-of-the-culture-war/

EXCERPT

This was Dublin on Saturday. There was a huge protest against the government’s immigration policy, and a counter-protest of self-styled radicals chanting ‘Refugees welcome here’. And it was about the most perfect distillation of the ‘culture war’ I’ve ever seen. Crowds of working people rallying behind the national flag as the virtuous of Dublin 4 flipped a collective middle finger at them and branded them fascist scum. There it was, in glorious technicolor, the great clash of our time: that between ordinary people worried about mass immigration, and an elevated class of high-status opinion-havers for whom borders are so 20th century.

The main protest was against the immigration policy overseen by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent years. Immigration is the hottest topic in Ireland right now. Swarms of Irish people are both bemused and troubled that Ireland’s foreign-born population is heading towards a fifth of the whole population. They’ve watched as sleepy green towns have become 35 per cent foreign-born almost overnight. No, they’re not racist, just curious: curious to know how this happened, why it happened, and whether they get a say in it.

The other side, the counter-protesters, could not have been more different. They were rallied by United Against Racism, a leftish group backed by Sinn Fein, the Greens and others in Dublin’s noisy virtue-displaying class. They waved the trans flag rather than the tricolour, because apparently the right of men to shit next to women is more important than the right of nations to self-determination. The words ‘fascists fuck off’ were scrawled on one trans flag, beautifully capturing the seething animus these snobs disguised as radicals feel for Dubliners who’ve never darkened the door of a university and probably think there are only two genders.

Where the big demo was a sea of tricolours, the counter-demo was full of the accoutrements of the neo-religion of woke. People were adorned in the keffiyeh, the Arab garment appropriated by the bourgeois of the West to signal their moral fitness for polite society. The Pride flag fluttered, because to this new class of faux-progressive individual identity matters far more than national identity. It was a clash of two moral universes, the green, white and gold of the tricolour signalling an affinity with the nation, the multicolours of Pride signalling a preference for the neoliberal cult of self-regard.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo “We Can’t Hire a White Guy”—a Professor on Life at Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has created a system of widespread racial discrimination.

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/princeton-university-president-christopher-eisgruber-anti-semitism-racial-discrimination

In 2020, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber made headlines for declaring the university guilty of “systemic racism.” He meant systemic racism against racial minorities, but in truth, Eisgruber’s institution has practiced the opposite: systematically discriminated against supposed “oppressors,” like whites and males.

Though most Princeton faculty support Eisgruber’s “anti-racism” policy, a faction of dissenters—a few dozen in number—has grown bolder in recent months. In these professors’ telling, Princeton’s president is a vengeful administrator who punishes anyone who questions DEI orthodoxy. They have worked behind the scenes to assemble evidence of his discriminatory policies and hope the Trump administration will restore the principle of colorblind equality on campus.

I sat down with one of these professors for a wide-ranging discussion about anti-Semitism, radical ideologies, and DEI at Princeton. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Rufo: Harvard and Columbia have drawn the most attention for radical ideologies and anti-Semitism on campus. Set the stage for what’s happening here at Princeton.

Professor: Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kenya: Jihadists Target Majority-Christian Country “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot.” Uzay Bulut

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kenya-jihadists-target-majority-christian-country/

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of when Islamic terrorists stormed the Garissa University College in Kenya, murdering 148 Christian students and injuring at least 79.

On April 2, 2015, gunmen took over 700 students hostage at the university campus. According to the witnesses, the terrorists asked the victims about their religion and segregated the Muslims from the Christians, intending to execute those who identified as Christians.

Student Collins Wetangula told the Associated Press that when the militants stormed his dorm, he could hear them demanding if residents were Muslim or Christian.

“If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot. With each blast of the gun, I thought I was going to die.”

“All I could hear were footsteps and gunshots; nobody was screaming because they thought this would lead the gunmen to know where they are,” he said. “The gunmen were saying sisi ni al-Shabab” (That is Swahili for “We are al-Shabaab.”)

The siege ended the same day, after all four of the attackers were killed.

The terrorist group al-Shabaab took responsibility for the attack. The group had also claimed responsibility for a deadly 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. This incident left 67 people dead and over 150 wounded.

Since then, Islamic terrorist attacks in Kenya and many other African nations have remained ongoing. In the latest incident, on March 23, 2025, al-Shabaab killed six police personnel after assailants attacked a base near the Somali border.

A jihad group formed in the early 2000s, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, was quickly nicknamed al-Shabaab, which means “The Youth.” It seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia.

Al-Shabaab was created as a member of the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Sharia law courts united against the federal government of Somalia. In 2012, al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda. Today, al- Shabaab controls parts of central and southern Somalia, where it enforces Sharia law.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in the areas it controls, al-Shabaab prohibits “various types of entertainment, such as movies and music; the sale of khat, a narcotic plant that is often chewed; smoking; and the shaving of beards. Stonings and amputations have been meted out to suspected adulterers and thieves. At the same time, the group bans cooperation with humanitarian agencies, creating a harrowing challenge in the face of unprecedented droughts.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Most Remarkable Thing About the Trump/Zelensky Sit-Down at the Pope’s Funeral Their first tête-à-tête since the fireworks in the Oval Office. by Robert Spencer

By on April 29th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-most-remarkable-thing-about-the-trump-zelensky-sit-down-at-the-popes-funeral/

In their first tête-à-tête since the fireworks in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for a remarkable fifteen-minute meeting at the Vatican Saturday, where both heads of state were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. The Saturday meeting was striking for several reasons, not least because it was just Trump and Zelensky talking things out alone. No aides or translators were present, and while photographers some terrific photos of the two leaders in intense discussion, reporters were not buzzing around performing their usual act of asking questions designed to show the world what an awful person Donald Trump is.

The privateness of the Trump-Zelensky confab is what makes it most remarkable. We just had four years of a president who not only couldn’t make the most insignificant of moves without a cheat sheet telling exactly what to do and when and how to do it. Now even Old Joe Biden’s top aides are admitting that the senescent corruptocrat simply wasn’t there, and that his dementia had advanced to the point that Old Joe knew nothing whatsoever about the policies his autopen was signing into law. What he appeared to know about the war in Ukraine, and everything else, was just an illusion created by his reading words off a teleprompter with reasonable competency.

Even before the misrule of Old Joe’s autopen, we have gotten used to seeing presidents surrounded by clouds of aides, and clearly those aides often did the real spadework in international diplomacy and other areas. Trump, however, is in this, as in so many ways, a sharp departure from what has become the norm for the chief executive. He is entirely capable of handling the negotiations with Zelensky (and others) without any input from aides, and even without their presence.

And on Saturday, amid all the pomp and bustle of the papal funeral, he did. White House communications director Steven Cheung later issued a terse announcement: “President Trump and President Zelenskyy met privately today and had a very productive discussion.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Human-Rights Bodies Corrupt Human Rights To Vilify Israel Defending Israel against politicized human-rights attacks is vital to preserving both human rights’ integrity and America’s founding principles. By Peter Berkowitz

By on April 29th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/29/human-rights-bodies-corrupt-human-rights-to-vilify-israel/

The United States has a special interest in safeguarding the integrity of human rights because America is founded on the rights inherent in all persons, and the nation’s political traditions revolve around them. Ordinary Americans as well as Washington policymakers, therefore, should condemn prominent human-rights organizations’ abuse of human rights to defame Israel and to legitimate jihadists’ efforts to destroy the Jewish state. Correcting the record about the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy and the Islamist forces sworn to its elimination is crucial to restoring the good name of human rights.

The Declaration of Independence holds that it is self-evidently true that human beings are endowed with “unalienable rights” – the 18th-century term for human rights. The Constitution aims to secure them. Much of the nation’s history revolves around the struggle to ensure that all Americans enjoy the rights that are theirs in virtue of their humanity. While the Constitution does not grant government a roving mandate to protect human rights around the world, it does invigorate the nation’s interest in serving as a beacon of freedom for those who suffer under authoritarian regimes and in cooperating with countries that share America’s understanding of the dignity of the person.

Dictatorships reject human rights, which place individual freedom ahead of dictators’ ambitions and decrees. Dictatorships’ aversion to human rights is as characteristic of the Iranian Ayatollahs’ Islamist theocracy as it is of Putin’s imperial Russia and of the Chinese Communist Party’s synthesis of Marxism-Leninism and traditional Chinese nationalism.

In the 21st century, powerful human-rights organizations have played into dictators’ hands by politicizing human rights. While persisting in affirming human-rights’ universality, these organizations equate them with a tendentious version of the progressive agenda. They wield human rights as a propaganda tool, inflating the claims of favored groups and disparaging the claims of the disfavored. The politicization of human rights sends the pernicious message to those who differ with the progressive left’s political priorities that human rights are a sham and should be expelled from respectable political discourse.

Nowhere do human-rights organizations more crudely politicize human rights than in the case of Israel.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities By Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin

By on April 28th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-in-foreign-funding-for-american-universities?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Foreign countries such as China and Qatar have poured $29 billion into campuses over the past few years. ‘Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.’

Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.

Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.

That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.

“The floodgates opened during the Biden era,” said NCRI’s co-founder Joel Finkelstein. ”This isn’t just a financial issue—it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian Leaders Play Musical Chairs To Dupe Western Donors by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 28th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21577/palestinians-hussein-al-sheikh-musical-chairs

The appointment of al-Sheikh needs to be seen in the context of Abbas’s effort to dupe the international community into believing that he is serious about reforming the PA and sharing power. Abbas’s main goal is to rid himself of the image of an autocrat and present himself as a reformist and democrat, so that Western donors will continue to pour money on him – foolishly with no conditions.

[T]hose who think that al-Sheikh would be different from Abbas are clueless. Al-Sheikh, a veteran member of Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction, is an exact replica of his boss. Abbas and he share the same positions on almost every issue related to Israel. Both have always used harsh rhetoric to condemn and vilify Israel, especially in the international arena.

Al-Sheikh may not represent the old guard in the Palestinian leadership, but his statements and positions reflect those of Abbas and the old guard. The Palestinians need real reforms that will end the corruption in PA institutions and remove corrupt and incompetent officials. The last thing they need is a new game of musical chairs designed to deceive both the Palestinians and the international community.

On April 26, a group of unelected Palestinian Authority (PA) officials approved the appointment of Hussein al-Sheikh as “Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Vice President of the [non-existent] State of Palestine.”

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who also serves as chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, had nominated the 64-year-old al-Sheikh for this position in accordance with a decision by the Palestinian Central Council, a body dominated by Abbas loyalists, to create the position of “Deputy Chairman of the PLO Executive Committee and Vice President of the State of Palestine.”

The 16-member PLO Executive Committee, which approved the nomination, is also dominated by Abbas loyalists, including al-Sheikh, who was appointed a few years ago by the now 89-year-old Abbas as its secretary general.

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