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May 2025

Qatar – The Real Face of the Snake How does a tiny Gulf state wield such outsized power – and why does the West keep looking the other way? by Dave Gordon

https://www.frontpagemag.com/qatar-the-real-face-of-the-snake/

How could it not raise eyebrows? Donald Trump is set to invest some $5.5 billion in Qatar, according to news reports, and he’s just received a $400 million jet from the Qataris.

This is the same Qatar that unabashedly hosted Hamas leaders, and funds the terror organization into the billions of dollars. It’s the same oil-rich country that is bankrolling Al Jazeera, a channel virtually synonymous with Jihadist propaganda, and that is also being sued for having alleged terror ties. To top it off, Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister has a history of pro-Hamas tweets.

Yet, if Qatar’s place in the world could be described as a Facebook relationship status, it’d be “It’s complicated.”

Complicated, indeed. After all, Qatar has announced that it is no longer playing the role of mediator between Israel and Hamas, and that it is closing the terror group’s offices within its borders. The country the size of Connecticut has also invested $50 million in pro-Trump American media Newsmax in 2019 and 2020. It gave the green light to thousands of fresh kosher meals being provided to Israelis during the 2022 World Cup in Doha, which now hosts a recently opened Jewish center.

Additionally, Qatar also houses Al Udeid, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East with 10,000 troops, a sign of cooperation that arose after the U.S.’s Saudi military base was shut down.

“It’s a massive amount of money that they have spent on an air base, that America got for free. And what they have done through this direct foreign direct foreign investment, is they have effectively convinced American decision makers, Congress people, the White House, to look the other way,” says Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an exclusive interview with this author, Schanzer described the country of 330,000 citizens as “this weird place” that, by his calculation, has “invested $150 billion to $300 billion in the United States’ influential spheres” — which has been revealed in detail lately by The Free Press.

In 2023, The New York Daily News reported that Qatar invested advertising contracts and sponsorships for A-list media and entertainment outlets such as Foreign Policy, VOX, Sundance, and Buzzfeed. $5 million was given to the L.A. Mayor’s Fund, and $20 million for the Nixon Foundation, and the Endowed Journalism Fellowship for the Carter Center. The “Qatari influence ecosystem” expands its reach to think tanks, influencers, PR firms, lobbyists and universities, and all of this “has effectively advanced the virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel views of the Al Thanis.”

Heather Mac Donald Two More Executive Orders Trump Should Sign In the interest of speeding up the Trumpian reform process

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-executive-orders-work-productivity-infrastructure-covid-masks

Wait around long enough, and a Trump executive order will likely come rolling out of the White House addressing a pet peeve or what would have been a pet peeve, had one known. In the interest of speeding up the Trumpian reform process, however, herewith are two proposed EO’s, based on close analysis of the extant orders. They are not exhaustive. Readers may have other needed EO’s in mind.

EXECUTIVE ORDER ENDING ILLEGAL EMPLOYEE ANTI-HARASSMENT TRAINING AND RESTORING AMERICAN PRODUCTIVITY.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. A bedrock principle of my administration is to make America productive again. Yet every year, America’s hardworking employees are subjected to hours of wasteful anti-harassment and anti-bias training. The only function of this immoral training is to provide employment to the graduates of unlawful women’s and black studies programs. These divisive training sessions presume that Americans are guilty of harassment and bias simply because of their race and sex. No evidence has been presented that America’s managers and workers are denying opportunities to their fellow workers because of prejudice, microaggressions, white privilege, rape culture, heteronormativity, ableism, neurohomogeneity, or the patriarchy. Nevertheless, influential institutions of American society, including the federal government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education require stultifying anti-bias and anti-harassment training. American dynamism is put on hold as employees click hopelessly through PowerPoint slides on bystander intervention, definitions of sex discrimination, and options for filing discrimination complaints.

India and Pakistan: ‘A Bad Nuclear War’ by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21654/india-pakistan-nuclear-war

The Trump administration, which had previously displayed a lack of interest in the conflict, then quickly intervened and brokered a ceasefire.

“[T]he possession of nuclear weapons may have incentivized risky confrontations that pass just below the ambiguous nuclear threshold.” — Aqil Shah, Foreign Affairs, May 23, 2025.

Pakistan did not have to detonate one of its nuclear warheads to shake the world. Now, an emboldened Islamabad will almost certainly hit India again.

Nukes are supposed to moderate national leaders and make them cautious. When it comes to India and Pakistan, however, the opposite now looks true.

“We stopped a nuclear conflict, I think it could have been a bad nuclear war, millions of people could have been killed, so I’m very proud of that,” President Donald Trump told reporters on May 12.

Proud he should be. Although New Delhi refuses to acknowledge Washington’s role in brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, the Trump administration was nonetheless instrumental in stopping fighting that could have escalated, as Newsweek wrote, “to the brink of all-out war.”

On April 22, gunmen murdered 26 Hindu tourists and others at Pahalgam, in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan also claims that territory.

New Delhi blames Islamabad for harboring militants who staged the attack. Pakistan denies involvement.

Democrats and Their DEI Albatrosses Democrats are trapped by the toxic DEI ideology they created—too afraid to reform, too broken to survive without it. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/29/democrats-and-their-dei-albatrosses/

A few Democrat officeholders, activists, and pundits are finally coming to their senses that their brand is toxic to a majority of the American people.

The Biden administration killed what was left of it in a number of ways.

First, it serially lied to Americans about the cognitive decline and cancerous condition of President Joe Biden, both while in and after office.

Only when caught did the complicit media fess up that the Biden inner circle serially misled the American people about Biden’s inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

Second, left-wing politicos used Biden as a waxen effigy. His job was to pose as a “moderate” cover to push through the most radical and unpopular agenda in the last half century.

Only that way could “Old Joe Biden from Scranton” and his backroom handlers ram down the throat of the American people unpopular policies that nearly wrecked the country: hyperinflation and $7 trillion in new debt, weaponization of the government, and partisan lawfare, an open border and 12 million illegal aliens, a racialist DEI commissariat, a crackpot Green New Deal, defunding the police, biological men competing in girls’ sports, and two theater-wide wars abroad.

Third, without either a functional president or viable initiatives, the new hard-left Democrats sought to brand Donald Trump as “Hitler” and half the country who supported him as “fascists.”

For nearly nine years, the Democrats launched one failed hoax after another on the American people: “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” and the lying so-called “51 intelligence authorities.” They proved quite willing to undermine the rule of law by manipulating the court system in efforts to destroy their bogeyman, Donald Trump.

Never had the American people seen a political party engineer 93 bogus indictments of a rival candidate and ex-president. Two dozen states tried to take Trump off their presidential ballots. And the Biden Department of Justice sicced an FBI SWAT team to barge into Trump’s home.

Democrats’ Brilliant New Strategy: Learn To Speak Like An American

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/30/rogets-thesaurus-wont-save-democrats/

This week, we saw a spate of news stories blaming Democrats’ troubles on their vocabulary. They’re just using too many darn multisyllabic, academic-sounding words and turning off numbskull voters, is the basic message.

Seriously?

The Democrats’ problem isn’t linguistic, it’s ideological. But no one in the party wants to admit that.

A Washington Post story this week – “Democratic troubles revive debate over left-wing buzzwords” – begins by saying:

Maybe it’s using the word ‘oligarchs’ instead of rich people. Or referring to ‘people experiencing food insecurity’ rather than Americans going hungry. Or ‘equity’ in place of ‘equality,’ or ‘justice-involved populations’ instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

The Post goes on to say that “liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles,” and quotes Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear saying that: “It makes Democrats or candidates using this speech sounding like they’re not normal.”

Earlier this year, a group of centrist Democrats gathered at a ritzy resort in Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the country, to talk among themselves about how to regain working-class trust.

Among the recommendations: “get out of elite circles and into real communities” and embrace “traditional American imagery.”

‘Foxes in the Vineyards’: Israel’s Very Own Subversives by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21653/israel-subversives

So here we have it: when radical activists are no longer in power, their hatred for conservative governments and their leaders apparently transcends respect for democracy.

Golan’s suspiciously self-serving ruminations, are, of course, pure fantasy, and uttered at great potential cost to Israel’s credibility… “if elections were held today, The Democrats would win 16 [out of 120] Knesset seats…”

Even before the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, Jews had a long history of trying to establish a state in the land of Israel according to a European template built on believing you can make peace with people whose goal in life is to destroy you. These efforts only gave birth to policies like the Oslo Accords, which turned out to be disastrous for Israel.

The schism, between the peace-wishers and the gimlet-eyed, is nothing new.

Despite its internal and external challenges, modern Israel remains stronger than ever. In 1969, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “we have a secret weapon and our secret weapon is: no alternative.” The Jews will triumph over all their enemies – including the foxes in their vineyard. They always have.

When Yair Golan, an IDF reserve Major-General and former member of Israel’s parliament, falsely implies that the nation’s soldiers “kill babies as a hobby” in Gaza, something is serious amiss among Israel’s leaders at this critical time of an existential war.

Golan continued in his May 20 remarks, “[I]t is time to replace this government as soon as possible so that this war can also come to an end.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet colleagues and even his political opponents, were outraged at Golan’s “blood libel” against the heroic warriors of Israel, who for nearly two years, have been defending their country and sacrificing their lives for it. Nearly 900 Israeli soldiers have been killed so far in the war begun by Hamas on October 7, 2023,

There is little difference between Golan’s blood libel and the one that emanated from the radical, biased United Nations, which on May 21 falsely claimed that Israel was going to starve to death 14,000 Palestinian babies in Gaza in the following 48 hours.

America’s Dead Ed A detailed analysis of the most recent NAEP reveals the deterioration of American public schools, and not surprisingly, the teachers’ unions are a significant contributor to the decline. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/28/americas-dead-ed/

On May 15, the Manhattan Institute published a brief on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Also known as the Nation’s Report Card, it is the gold standard assessment for measuring American students’ proficiency in various subjects. As a former middle school testing coordinator, I helped administer the exam once and saw the test delivered with the utmost professionalism. Students are randomly selected without cherry-picking, and the test is handled with great attention to detail.

Unfortunately, the 2024 scores reveal that American schoolchildren are on a downward slope. Only about a third of 4th- and 8th-grade students are proficient in reading or mathematics. A few of the key findings from the Manhattan Institute report include:

Student proficiency levels have stagnated or declined since the early 1990s, with 4th- and 8th-grade reading proficiency at an average of 30%–31%. Math proficiency for both grades peaked in 2013 (42% for 4th grade and 35% for 8th grade) but has declined to 39% (4th grade) and 28% (8th grade).
Between 2013 and 2024, the lowest-performing public school students (25th percentile) lost an average of 12 points, compared with an 8-point decline among charter school students. Among average-performing students (50th percentile), public schools declined by 5 points, while charter schools remained stable. Charter schools provided more stability across all student performance levels.
States with collective bargaining laws for educators saw steeper declines in reading (–3.7% in 4th grade, –4.9% in 8th grade) and math (–2.7% in 4th grade, –4.4% in 8th grade) compared with smaller declines in non-collective bargaining states. While non-collective bargaining states started with lower scores, their rate of decline was smaller, suggesting that greater flexibility in adapting instructional practices is beneficial.
Even with record-high education spending per student in some states, such as New York, student achievement remains low, demonstrating that funding alone does not drive academic success.

“Our lowest-performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused to right this ship.”

When test scores show that the system is failing, the typical response is that we must spend more money. However, as noted in the Manhattan Institute paper, this argument is flawed. New York, for example, spends $36,293 per student—more than any other state. Yet its 4th-graders rank 32nd and 46th nationally on reading and math NAEP exams.

When Antarctica Grows Ice and Science Gets Cold Feet David Manney

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/05/27/when-antarctica-grows-ice-and-science-gets-cold-feet-n4940187

The Ice That Wasn’t Supposed to Be

Imagine your mechanic swearing your engine would seize up in July, only to call you a year later, embarrassed, to say your truck is somehow running better than ever. 

That’s the climate science community this month after NASA revealed a stunning twist: Antarctica has gained ice, yes, gained between 2021 and 2023, despite what every climate model said would happen.

This wasn’t a whisper. 

It was a satellite-verified admission. 

NASA reported that Antarctica experienced a net gain in ice mass because of unexpected and sustained snowfall, even as global temperatures continued to rise. 

The scientists were stunned. Their models didn’t predict it. 

They couldn’t explain it right away. 

Their conclusion? A short-term fluke that doesn’t mean much.

Settled Science or Sinking Ship?

For years, we’ve been told the models are settled science. That every click of the thermostat was heading us toward glacial collapse. 

Politicians invoked these predictions to regulate industries, tax carbon, and lecture us on our thermostats and SUVs. 

But now, with ice forming where melt was prophesied, it’s suddenly a “statistical hiccup.”

This is where the analogy ends and the reckoning begins.

Israel’s latest crime? Feeding the people of Gaza The hysterical response to Israel’s aid initiative in Gaza has exposed the lunacy of Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/27/israels-latest-crime-feeding-the-people-of-gaza/

Israel is behaving criminally again. It has once more turned its nose up at ‘humanitarian principles’. It is trampling even harder than usual all over international law. What inhuman act has the pariah state committed now? Brace yourselves: it is seeking to feed the people of Gaza.

This is the news that the Jewish State, in tandem with the US, has launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its aim is to get foodstuffs and other essentials to the benighted people of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. You would think the activist class would be pleased at this news. They’ve been renting their garments for months over an alleged tyranny of famine in Gaza, which they say is the worst case of ‘urban starvation’ since ‘the siege of Leningrad’. Alas, you would be wrong. They hate this initiative. Why? Because Israel is behind it, and in their twisted minds, so addled by Israelophobia, everything Israel does is evil.

The haughty cynicism of the West’s Israel-haters in response to this humanitarian drive has been extraordinary. The foundation started its work yesterday. Truckloads of food were dispatched on day one. Many more are due this week. It is reported that Israel’s aim is to set up four secure distribution sites in central and southern Gaza. Israeli forces, assisted by private military contractors from the US, will oversee the safe provision of food to the neediest Gazans who have fled the fierce fighting in the north of the strip. Israel’s hope is that armed guards will deter Hamas from looting the aid and hawking it on the black market to boost the coffers of its fascistic war against the Jewish nation, as has happened many times in the past 18 months.

Given how dire things are in Gaza, after a year-and-a-half of this infernal war Hamas started, this should be cause for celebration. Gaza’s innocents are as much the victims of Hamas’s fascistic writ as Israelis are. Their dignity, and in many cases their lives, have been sacrificed by Gaza’s autocratic religious regime at the altar of its racist crusade against the Jews’ homeland. These people did not ask for their land to be made into a theatre for Hamas’s demented apocalyptic showdown with the Jews. They need relief, they need food. And yet, far from breathing a sigh of relief that many of them will now receive precisely that, the West’s legion Israelophobes are raging over Israel’s life-saving aid.

Why does this aid initiative feel ‘so problematic’, asks one headline? I can answer that: it’s because the Jewish State is spearheading it.

We Have No Moral Obligation to Forgive or Forget the Biden Lies “But-but-but you’re picking on a guy with a stutter who has prostate cancer!” by Kurt Schlichter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/we-have-no-moral-obligation-to-forgive-or-forget-the-biden-lies/

What a remarkable coincidence that Joe Biden’s wranglers discovered he had cancer right in the middle of the revelations about how he was totally senile and everyone around him, including his very real doctor wife, covered it up. Yeah, right. His puppet masters knew, even if that human rutabaga didn’t. Stage IV prostate cancer doesn’t sneak up on you. It’s easy to detect. I know my PSA. It’s .07. I got it tested a couple of weeks ago. I get it tested every year. Weird that I have better medical care than the President of the United States, right? But you don’t believe that. And I don’t believe that. The hacks, frauds, and charlatans demanding that you believe that certainly don’t believe that.The Democrat Party: It’s all a lie. It’s all a scam. They hid his likely terminal disease so he could be reelected, disclose it, quit, be hailed as a selfless hero (Hat Tip: Buck Sexton), and hand the country to that drooling half-

wit vice president of his. We all know it. And we need to say it, loudly and often, regardless of how hard the whiners whine.

There are two categories of people who heard the “news” – well, it was only news to the American people – and immediately told us that we need to slow our roll on demanding accountability for the rudderless presidency in solemn deference to this ultra-convenient revelation. The first kind are nice people, too nice. Some are serial Fredocon invertebrates who always counsel weakness, submission, and silence. Some believe Christian charity requires not only prayers for him and his family but a free pass on this massive wrongdoing for everyone involved. Others have an understandable sensitivity to the subject because they had family members who suffered the same terrible illness that Joe Biden has just been revealed to have, even though everybody around him must’ve known he had it for years and simply lied to cover it up.

Well, the sissies can pound sand; they look at history and think the Vichy French were too belligerent. I’m not going to judge the others; you need to follow your conscience. But I’m also not going to listen to them. I’m going to say what I want, all the time, and I’m going to continue to point out that Joe Biden is an evil, senile, corrupt pervert, who was and is surrounded by minions interested only in retaining their prestige, power, and plunder.