NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jonathan Turley on the SCOTUS challenge to universal Injunctions

Posted By on May 17th, 2025

https://jonathanturley.org/2025/05/15/a-modest-request-the-supreme-court-hears-challenge-to-national-or-universal-injunctions/

Today, the United States Supreme Court will hear three consolidated cases in Trump v. CASA on the growing use of national or universal injunctions. This is a matter submitted on the “shadow docket” and the underlying cases concern the controversy over “birthright citizenship.” However, the merits of those claims are not at issue. Instead, the Trump Administration has made a “modest request” for the Court to limit the scope of lower-court injunctions to their immediate districts and parties, challenging the right of such courts to bind an Administration across the nation.

The case is the consolidation of three matters: Trump v. CASA out of  Maryland; Trump v. Washington out of Washington State, and Trump v. New Jersey, out of Massachusetts. These cases also present standing issues since the Administration challenges the argument that there is a cognizable “injury” to individuals who may travel to the states bringing the actions.

However, the main question is the scope of injunctions.

As I have previously written, district court judges have issued a record number of injunctions in the first 100 days of the Trump Administration. Under President George W. Bush, there were only six such injunctions, which increased to 12 under Obama. However, when Trump came to office, he faced 64 such orders in his first term.

When Biden and the Democrats returned to office, it fell back to 14. That was not due to more modest measures. Biden did precisely what Trump did in seeking to negate virtually all of his predecessors’ orders and then seek sweeping new legal reforms. He was repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution, but there was no torrent of preliminary injunctions at the start of his term.

BOOKS Comments turned off

James Comey’s Red Thread, Chapter 1 Now more than ever before. Diana West

Posted By on May 17th, 2025

The first investigation into why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump. There was nothing normal about the 2016 presidential election, not when senior U.S. officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government—designed to stop terrorist attacks—against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic. The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from “politics as usual” to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election? Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more. Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America’s first “America First” and most anti-Communist president. If we just give it a pull, the “red thread” is very long and very deep.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Qatar Bought America The tiny Gulf nation has spent almost $100 billion to establish its influence in Congress, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations. What does it want in return?By Frannie Block and Jay Solomon

Posted By on May 17th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-qatar-bought-america

On Wednesday, Donald Trump will travel to Qatar. On his trip, the president will visit Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military facility in the region, and attend meetings with the ruling Al Thani family. Perhaps he will also thank them for the $400 million gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet that will reportedly be retrofitted for his use, and then transferred to his presidential library.

The airplane deal was signed off by Attorney General Pam Bondi. She used to work at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm that received $115,000 a month from Qatar to fight human trafficking, according to a 2019 contract reviewed by The Free Press.

She’s not the only one in the administration with ties to the Persian Gulf state.

President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs when it represented Qatar’s embassy in Washington. FBI Director Kash Patel worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn’t register as a foreign agent.

And then there is Steve Witkoff, president Trump’s longtime friend and senior adviser, who is accompanying him on his trip this week. For months now, Witkoff has served as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East—and his name has been floated as a future national security adviser. Witkoff also happens to be a beneficiary of Qatar’s largesse: In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought out his faltering investment in New York’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.

Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is hard at work planning a new luxury golf resort near Qatar’s capital, Doha, in partnership with a Qatari company. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. will speak next week at the invitation-only Qatar Economic Forum in a session titled “Investing in America.”

If you were just a casual reader of these facts—an ordinary American who doesn’t think much about the Middle East after America’s traumatic wars of the 2000s—you would think Qatar is a top American ally, a trustworthy partner, and a key hub of international commerce—a country in good enough standing that the president of the United States would use its plane as Air Force One.

But Qatar is also a seat of the Muslim Brotherhood, a crucial source of financing to Hamas, a diplomatic and energy partner of Iran, a refuge for the Taliban’s exiled political leadership, financier and cheerleader of Palestinian terrorism, and the chief propagandist of Islamism through its media powerhouse, Al Jazeera, which reaches 430 million people in more than 150 countries.

Key members of Qatar’s royal family have made their admiration for Islamism—and Hamas specifically—very clear. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of Qatar’s emir and the chairperson of an educational nonprofit funneling millions into American schools, praised the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 massacre, Yahya Sinwar: “He will live on,” she wrote on X after his death last year, “and they will be gone.”

The question is: How did a refuge of Islamist radicalism, a country criticized for modern-day slave labor, become the center of global politics and commerce? How did this tiny peninsular country of 300,000 citizens and millions of noncitizen migrant workers manage to put itself smack-dab in the center of global diplomacy—and so successfully ingratiate itself within the Trump administration?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Every Federal Judge Should Not Have More Power Than the President A government of the judges, by the judges and for the judges. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 17th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/every-federal-judge-should-not-have-more-power-than-the-president/

Federal district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions are a constitutional abomination that allows the opposing party to ‘judge shop’ and empowers federal judges to overrule the president not just in local cases, but on a national level, forcing the president to run to the Supreme Court for relief.

That is not remotely the system that the Framers had in mind.

The idea of the Supreme Court overruling the president was controversial back then when applied not just to an individual case but to setting a national precedent, but the idea of a D.C. judge being able to issue a nationwide injunction was inconceivable.

The second term of the Trump administration showed us what happens when a massive activist leftist lawfare campaign coordinates with federal judges to effectively function as a shadow government.

And that means the country is no longer run by a government of elected officials with some appointed officials wielding limited powers, but that it’s the elected officials who have very limited powers, while the appointed officials, whether federal judges or bureaucrats, have virtually unlimited powers.

America ceases to be a government of the people and becomes a government of the judges, by the judges and for the judges.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Lets China Win in Tariff War — First Round, Anyhow by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21626/china-win-tariff-war

[T]he arrangement is a win for China.

The main barrier to American goods in China, however, is not Chinese tariffs but China’s many non-tariff barriers, which are untouched by the new deal. Therefore, the tariff rollbacks benefit Chinese exporters far more than America’s.

The Chinese promise is unlikely to be worth anything. The only way Xi Jinping can honor his pledge is to give up most elements of communism because non-tariff barriers, predatory trade practices, and even theft are inherent in that system.

Trump is still hoping for robust relations with the Communist Party, but unfortunately that is not possible.

Xi cannot now admit that China needs the United States, and he certainly cannot be seen as giving in to American coercion. In fact, the Chinese regime since the tariff announcement has been crowing about its win over Trump.

On May 12th, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” urged a “decoupling for strategic necessities.”

Yes. And “a complete decoupling,” which as Trump tweeted in 2020 would remain “a policy option,” would be even better. Why should Americans shovel any cash to Communist Party’s coffers?

On May 12, President Donald Trump announced a “total reset with China.”

“The best part of the deal,” he said, was that “China agreed to open itself up to American business.” Beijing, Trump proclaimed, will “suspend and remove all of its non-monetary barriers.”

In the meantime, both the U.S. and China agreed to drop tariffs by 115 percentage points. The general American tariff rate on China’s goods is now 30%. The general Chinese rate is 10%. Both reductions will be in effect for 90 days.

China also agreed to reverse “all the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025.”

American tariffs in place before April 2, such as the Section 232 and Section 301 levies, remain in effect.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Golden Era in America: The First 100 Days of President Trump’s Second Term by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21625/trump-golden-era-america

The first 115 days of the Trump Administration have been filled more remedial action than we have seen from most presidents in their entire terms.

Invariably, the forecasters focus on the next 12 short months while failing to appreciate the sweep of history that has brought us to this next chapter of American history. The pessimistic “bears” among us have warned that there are systematic threats to our economy, our nation, and the stability of the world. The optimistic “bulls” will tout the enormous advances in reducing the former administration’s inflation and out-of-control illegal border crossings, the brimming new technology, foreign investments in the trillions that will bring many new jobs, Wall Street confidence, and a resilient American economy that continues to set the pace for the rest of the world.

In truth, they are both right, and the reality of America in the first half of 2025 is far more nuanced than any one side would have you believe.

With an appreciation of history, one needs to look at our nation as a democracy that has demonstrated time and time again an enormous resiliency to profound changes that would have fractured any other country — and that has been so literally since our independence.

As president, George Washington had to send troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion when a band of angry citizens of a new United States violently protested a tax on alcohol levied to pay off Revolutionary War debts. Without a strong response, America could have disintegrated at the start.

Economic cycles of boom and bust could have dismantled our democracy. Few Americans recognize how close our nation came to the political edge during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when massive unemployment led to despair among millions.

World War II propelled America into its role of a global superpower, which it continues to hold today. The war’s legacy created a pathway for civil rights, the emergence of the middle class, an interstate highway system that connected us to all points of the compass, and a strong and resilient government that avoided nuclear war through strength, leading to our ultimate victory in the Cold War.

RELIGION Comments turned off

The Future of American Jewry After October 7 How to find purpose and clarity in horror’s wake by Dan Senor

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/articles/dan-senor/american-jewry-after-october-7/

For many of us, October 7 was a wake-up call of sorts, which gave birth to what some have taken to calling “October 8 Jews.” I prefer not to use that term, as it implies that they suddenly became Jews on October 8. 

Nonetheless, there was a crack in Jewish consciousness on October 8, 2023. Suddenly, many Jews began to think differently about their Jewish identity, their Jewish community, and their connection to Jewish peoplehood everywhere—especially in Israel.  Sociologists and Jewish leaders heralded a “surge of interest” in Jewish life. 

People started wearing Jewish stars for the first time. They went to rallies. They donated hundreds of millions to emergency campaigns and sent supplies to IDF units. And the new openness to Jewish identity opened them up to indignation and shock. Over WhatsApp, people forwarded articles by the score in chat groups. I call them the “Can You Believe!?” groups, as in: “Can you BELIEVE Christiane Amanpour aired that segment?” Or “Can you BELIEVE Thomas Friedman trashed Israel again in his column?” In truth, this wasn’t as much a Jewish awakening as an outpouring of Jewish adrenaline. 

And as with adrenaline, I think we can all feel the moment fading with the passage of time. It would be dangerous for us to return to the false sense of security we felt on October 6. 

_____________

Since October 7, I have heard the following two comments more than any other from American Jews.

First: Jews have played key leadership roles in so many pillars of society: finance and Hollywood, hospitals, the environment and civil rights, the arts, symphonies, museums and elite universities. How could they turn on us?

We hear this all the time. We Jews have collectively spent so much, even named wings after ourselves at these institutions. But, historically speaking, none of this has mattered in stemming the tide of anti-Semitism. No, in fact, our perceived power is deployed against us in these periods. Jews in the Diaspora have too often been, as Douglas Murray says, prominent but weak. 

Murray’s observation calls to mind The Pity of It All, Amos Elon’s 2002 chronicle of German Jews from the mid-18th century until Hitler’s rise in 1933—timely today because it shatters so many of our comfortable narratives about progress, assimilation, and the supposed safety of living in an educated society. Elon shows how, over nearly two centuries, German Jews transformed themselves from marginalized peddlers and cattle dealers into the intellectual, cultural, and economic backbone of German society. They didn’t just assimilate—they excelled. A community that never was more than 1 percent of the German population produced bankers, journalists, artists, industrialists, and academics whose contributions to the flourishing of Germany are well documented.

They believed in Germany. They believed in Enlightenment values. They believed that reason and education would triumph over prejudice. They were wrong.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Mark Levin gives Tucker Carlson a well-deserved dressing-down Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/mark-levin-gives-tucker-carlson-a-well-deserved-dressing-down/

Tucker Carlson is a master of disingenuousness, to put it generously. That’s why the only viewers still charmed by his trademark deer-in-the-headlights act are those on the right who champion the conspiracy theorists and antisemites to whom he regularly provides a platform.

Some of his interviewees are overt Jew-haters; others covert ones who pretend that their only beef is with “Israeli policy.”  You know, just like a huge swath of the Democratic Party that they loathe.

Tucker’s neat trick, no longer so tidy, is to react to critics—fellow supporters of President Donald Trump with a whole different take on foreign policy—by engaging in not-so-plausible deniability where his true feelings about Jews and the Jewish state are concerned. One method is to refer to the Tribe as “neocons.”

Never mind that the isolationists in the MAGA camp purposely abuse the term or are willfully ignorant about its origin. Neoconservatism was the name given to a movement of liberal intellectuals who opposed the tenets of the New Left—the “woke” of the 1960s and ’70s—and shifted allegiance to the Republican Party.

Ironically, they were the “Make America Great Again” crowd of that period, and instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter. Many, but by no means all, were Jews.

A key element of their patriotism had to do with American greatness, exceptionalism and power on the world stage (does “peace through strength” sound familiar?). Rejecting détente and taking a tough stand against the Soviet Union, in order to win the Cold War, were central.

That defeating one’s enemies has become a dirty concept for the likes of Tucker and his echo chamber—who use the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan to accuse backers of U.S. intervention in the Middle East of “war-mongering”—is suspicious, to say the least.

It’s one thing to conclude that spreading democracy among Islamist regimes is problematic, if not impossible. It’s something else entirely to attribute the mistake to “neocon” trigger-happiness. Unless, of course, the aim is to blame Israel for “dragging” the United States into battles on behalf of the Jews.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Ian Kingsbury New Documentary Proves Trump Is Right to Defund PBS The film uses discredited research to blame racism for black health disparities and push ideologically driven “solutions.”

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-defund-pbs-racism-black-americans-health-documentary

Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS, wasted no time in condemning President Trump’s May 2 executive order cutting federal funding for the public broadcaster. Defunding her organization, she declared, “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming.” Only days earlier, however, PBS had aired just the kind of ideologically biased documentary that demonstrates why Trump is right to defund the network.

The documentary, Critical Condition: Health in Black America, focuses on a real and important problem: on average, health outcomes for black Americans are worse than those for people of other races. But instead of addressing the real causes of this crisis—namely group differences in diet, exercise, and health literacy—the documentary settles on the false, simplistic narrative peddled by activists that all differences in health outcomes must be caused by racism.

The documentary largely focuses on racial differences in maternal mortality—in particular, on differences in the incidence of preeclampsia—as evidence of systemic racism. But the biological predisposition for preeclampsia in black women, well-established in the medical literature, is never mentioned. In other words, the documentary misleads black mothers and valorizes shoddy social science over the rigorous research that could actually reduce racial disparity.

The documentary also fixates on racism in its discussion of medical algorithms, claiming that adjusting for race in tests of biological functioning serves no purpose other than reinforcing race as a biological construct. This is pure nonsense. Race-based adjustments demonstrably improve the precision of clinical algorithms. For example, African ancestry is associated with lower lung volumes and higher levels of muscle mass. When clinical algorithms don’t acknowledge these realities, they result in less accurate diagnoses of asthma, kidney disease, and other conditions.

The antidotes that the documentary proposes for the alleged systemic racism in medicine are equally unscientific. The film gives a fawning depiction of “implicit bias training” at Charles Drew University of Medicine, accompanied by a call for medical schools to increase their adoption of such activities. But research shows that implicit bias is neither detectable nor fixable. Trainings on this topic are thus completely unproductive—though they do serve to enrich the “diversity industrial complex.”

The documentary also calls for a greater focus on the racial composition of the health-care workforce. It arrives at this conclusion by citing research that allegedly shows minority patients receive better care from racially concordant doctors. This is yet another false claim that relies on a combination of cherry-picked studies and ideologically driven, methodologically unsound research, as I have shown in a report for Do No Harm.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Battle Against Identity Politics on Campuses Has Only Begun Even as Trump targets Harvard over racial preferences, the university is offering a seminar, “Empowering Black Leaders,” steeped in racialist thinking.

Posted By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.