NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Republicans need to grow a spine and support Trump’s agenda

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5291004-republicans-trump-support-agenda/

That didn’t take long. After a few months of celebrating Donald Trump’s astonishing political comeback by offering the president near-unanimous support, Republicans are going squishy.

The Trump agenda is hanging by a thread. Congress, which up to now has done very little to help the White House solve our border crisis, codify DOGE spending cuts or rebalance our justice system, now has to act. They have to pass a “big beautiful” bill to extend the tax reductions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act while incorporating some of the campaign promises the president made, like eliminating taxes on tips.

This is no time for weak knees; failing to extend the tax cuts could throw the economy into recession and clobber Republicans in the midterms.

Unhappily, some GOP legislators have been wilting over cutting Medicaid, while others torpedoed President Trump’s pickfor U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It looks like a dip in Trump’s approval rating and uncertainty about the success of his economic program are causing palpitations throughout the caucus.

We hoped for more. After all, Republicans would likely not be in charge of the House or Senate but for Trump’s extraordinary win. Surely that should earn him more than 100 days’ support.

At the top of Trump’s agenda is the reconciliation bill, into which Congress will jam as many of the president’s campaign promises as possible. Under the rules governing reconciliation measures, reductions in revenues for not taxing overtime, for instance, must be paid for. One solution is cutting Medicaid, a program that has spiraled out of control and is ripe for a serious overhaul.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is Trump really turning his back on Bibi and Israel? Don’t bet on it Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/is-trump-really-turning-his-back-on-bibi-and-israel-dont-bet-on-it/

It doesn’t take a degree in political science to sense an ulterior motive in recent reports about a rift between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The effort to promote the alleged schism isn’t exactly covert, after all.

No, it emanates from two sets of extremists: isolationists in the Trump camp and anti-Netanyahu Israelis. The former consider the slogan “Make America Great Again” as an excuse for staying out of the world’s conflicts, as though battles abroad, even against radical Islamists bent on toppling “the Great Satan” and annihilating the small one, are of no concern to Americans.

These particular MAGA Republicans view anyone who supports the use of military force to defeat Iran and its proxies as a “neocon warmonger” willing to risk American lives on behalf of the Jewish state.

Antisemitic undertones aside, Israelis with separate false claims—among them that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza at the expense of the hostages to preserve his coalition—are happy to echo the schism narrative. This group includes protest leaders and their parrots in the media who consider Bibi more dangerous than a nuclear Iran and its terrorist tentacles.

Though Trump’s confusing statements on what a deal with the Islamic Republic would entail—a complete dismantling of its entire nuclear program or only that which is enriching uranium for military purposes—have provided fodder for journalists jumping on the opportunity to publish havoc-wreaking accounts, nail-biters should take the storyline with a grain of salt.

The same goes for hysteria over his announcement on Tuesday of a truce with the Houthis. Since the Iran-backed terrorist group had “capitulated,” and promised to stop attacking ships in the Red Sea, said Trump, the U.S. would cease bombing in Yemen.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Choosing sides in the battle over fighting antisemitism Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/choosing-sides-in-the-battle-over-fighting-antisemitism/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

The latest round of congressional hearings about antisemitism on college campuses that took place this week showed that some academic leaders still haven’t gotten the message that the era of woke leftist discrimination against Jews has got to end. In an echo of the clueless and transparently discriminatory stands of the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, the head of Haverford College demonstrated that she was both in denial about the plight of Jewish students and unwilling to do something about it.

What’s worse is the fact that some of those we ought to expect to regard this issue as not merely a priority but a matter of life and death are opposing the first and only serious effort to rid the education system of this vile prejudice.

That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from recent events, as President Donald Trump’s administration and congressional Republicans are stepping up their campaign against institutions of higher education that have either tolerated or encouraged Jew-hatred on their campuses.

This crisis had been brewing for years as progressives completed their long march through institutions of higher education and imposed toxic ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism on curricula, as well as admissions and disciplinary practices throughout the nation. The widespread adoption of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) fomented the surge in antisemitism that broke out following the Hamas-led Palestinian terrorist attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. By seeking to racialize and divide society, in addition to pointedly excluding Jews from the protections afforded to other minorities, DEI reigned over colleges and universities, setting the stage for an unprecedented siege on Jewish students.

Yet instead of giving their wholehearted support to Trump’s effort to force schools to end the harassment of Jews and the practices that backed it up, groups like the American Jewish Committee are siding with the opponents of the administration’s program, including a list of more than 500 rabbis from the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What President Trump Needs in His Next National Security Adviser Trump has ousted NSA Michael Waltz and tapped Marco Rubio as interim, signaling a businesslike, high-stakes push for loyalty, competence, and bold execution in national security. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/09/what-president-trump-needs-in-his-next-national-security-adviser/

President Trump’s decision to remove Michael Waltz as his National Security Adviser (NSA) came as no surprise to Trump administration watchers who knew a change was coming. The president’s decision to nominate Waltz as UN ambassador was a classy way of taking care of a loyal supporter and decorated Army veteran who didn’t work out in a critical administration post.

Waltz’s ouster reflects how Trump runs the presidency as a business: he will not hesitate to replace officials who are not performing to his satisfaction or have lost his confidence. I expect Trump to be ruthless in managing top staff in his second term, as he has little time to enact an extremely ambitious agenda to take back our country.

By contrast, Joe Biden did not fire or replace any senior official in his four years as president. Notably, Biden failed to fire anyone after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history.

Trump added the acting NSA job to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s portfolio. This is reportedly a temporary arrangement that could last six months.

The decision to dual-hat Rubio in these top national security posts was a sign of Trump’s confidence and trust in the former Florida senator. (Rubio is actually “quad-hatted”—he also serves as acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration.) However, as much as I respect Rubio and his capabilities, this is not an ideal situation due to the pressing responsibilities the Secretary of State must perform as America’s chief diplomat and the duties of the National Security Advisor, who serves as the top national security aide to the president and must be available to him 24/7.

Based on my experience as the National Security Council Chief of Staff and discussions with people inside and outside the Trump administration, I have come up with the following recommendations on what the president should look for in his next NSA. (I have a few more suggestions that I will pass to the president’s team privately.)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Europe’s Illegal Land-Grab: Part III by Karys Rhea

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21492/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-iii

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense.

The EU would never allow an external entity to abridge the sovereignty of one of its own member states in this way, nor would it endorse such behavior anywhere else.

“To think that the Palestinians are only enraged about settlements is also fatuous nonsense. Talk to the 15-year-olds. Their grievance is not just with Israeli settlements, but with Israel. Most Palestinians simply do not accept that the Jews have any authentic right to be here.” —Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 31, 2000.

The progressive international public has fervently bought into the red herring of Jewish settlements while hypocritically remaining silent regarding settlement activity in Western Sahara, northern Cyprus, Ceuta and Melilla, Tibet, Kashmir and the Falkland Islands.

The mainstream media and cultural apparatus conveniently ignore the history of these Jewish “settlers,” many of whom are indigenous to the region but whose parents or grandparents were forcibly expelled from the West Bank or parts of Jerusalem in 1948 when Jordan seized and occupied territory. Instead of acknowledging them as descendants of refugees merely returning home…

Those who understand the scope of this have witnessed how the plan of former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is part of a much bigger strategy of illegal land use that extends to the Negev Desert in the south and to the Galilee in the north, all driven by a European-supported narrative that replaces Jewish history with the 20th-century fiction of Palestinian-Arab nationalism.

The international community continues to conspire against the reality of Israel’s existence by testing the limits of its sovereignty and threatening the Jewish right to self-determination and self-defense. Palestinian-Arab society, among the most antisemitic in the world (long before Jewish communities in the West Bank were part of the picture), in which Palestinian Authority government-controlled television, media, textbooks and mosques encourage violence against Jews, praise Adolf Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust, use Jewish “settlements” as a smokescreen to distract from their real agenda based on a single belief held for centuries: Jews do not belong.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The indestructible myth of famine in Gaza Universalism’s falsehoods are protected by a doctrine of infallibility Melanie Phillips

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Yet again, the myth has been revived that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip.

This claim, which has done so much to incite attacks on Jews, has been promulgated repeatedly by mainstream western media during the past 18 months of war. It is a lie that distorts yet another lie.

Time and again, UN agencies and NGOs have warned that famine and starvation are imminent. But this has never happened. More food has been admitted to Gaza than people need.

The problem has been that Hamas took much of it to feed themselves and to sell it on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war.

Nevertheless, the Gazans have overwhelmingly remained conspicuously well-fed, while the people who really have been starved are the Israeli hostages they hold captive. Yet the media has continued to insist that civilians in Gaza are being starved to death.

Two months ago, with an estimated four months’ worth of food supplies remaining in Gaza, Israel instituted a blockade on further aid transports to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

The Israel Defence Forces will now oversee food distribution in southern Gaza in order to stop Hamas stealing it and to funnel civilians into those areas, isolating and weakening Hamas to enable the IDF finally to destroy it. The United Nations has refused to accept this plan, demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamas in its war against Israel.

Stupefyingly, it is simply impossible to change the wicked media narrative that Israel is starving Gazan civilians to death. Facts and evidence get absolutely nowhere. Many believe that this is because of the false and obsessive belief that Israel is a colonial oppressor. But this embrace of revolutionary Marxist ideology is only part of the reason.

These lies have penetrated far beyond the keffiyeh-clad hordes of demonstrators. In Britain and elsewhere, it’s now the accepted unwisdom across great swathes of the professions, administrative class and business world that Israel is starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza.

When confronted with facts contradicting every one of these claims, such people ask incredulously: “Are you really saying that you are right while everyone else — the UN, the international legal tribunals, the entire humanitarian establishment — is wrong?”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where’s the Beef? It’s in Trump’s Unprecedented Trade Deal With Britain Victoria Taft

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/05/08/wheres-the-beef-its-in-trumps-trade-deal-with-britain-n4939594

The first of the cascade of trade and tariff deals expected under the new Trump administration was announced in the Oval Office on Thursday. The “unprecedented” deal was the first time in decades that American producers will have freer and “streamlined customs” access to the U.K. markets.

The announcement allows the sale of U.S. beef into the U.K. for the first time in decades and ensures an increase in the purchase of Boeing commercial jetliners.

Flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance and on a conference call with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Donald Trump announced an agreement “worth billions of dollars” with the U.K. that reconfigures tariff prices on goods, expands the market for American farmers and ranchers, and added a phalanx of Boeing jetliners to that nation’s commercial fleet.

The Trump White House called it “a breakthrough” and “a good deal.”

The “unprecedented” deal not only includes U.S. tariffs but also a reduction in tariffs by the U.K. The deal introduces a reset of the baseline framework for trade, which will create a $5 billion in exports opportunities for American farmers, ranchers, and other producers can sell into the U.K. That includes beef. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the beef deal with “exponentially” increase the amount of beef that ranchers sell. 

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s fight for civilisation Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults is a vital account of 7 October and its aftermath. Cory Franklin

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/israels-fight-for-civilisation/

“Along with spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, Douglas Murray one of the two best writers in the English language about this conflict. As Murray writes, history is constantly being rewritten and that’s why this book is so important. In writing it, Murray has done the cause of democracy, and the victims of one of our century’s most unforgivable crimes, an important service.”

Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of the West is a must-read on the Israel-Hamas war.

After 7 October 2023, Murray spent the better part of 18 months in Israel and Gaza, documenting the Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath. His account of what Hamas did is instructive, harrowing and tragic. There was indiscriminate rape and murder, including that of babies and the elderly. Families were burned alive when attackers could not breach their safe rooms and so set their houses on fire. And partygoers were gunned down at the Nova music festival.

Murray points out that, in contrast with the Nazis, who tried to hide evidence of their mass slaughter, Hamas fighters recorded and proudly broadcast their own crimes. Who could forget the notorious young terrorist who, on the day of 7 October, called his parents in Gaza and boasted:

‘Hi dad… Open my WhatsApp now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!… I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed 10! Ten with my own hands! Put mum on.’

His mother then expresses regret – only that she was not there with him to savour the moment.

Much of Murray’s focus is on the reaction in the West. He dismantles the myth that the world’s sympathy was with Israel in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, a solidarity which it supposedly forfeited with its subsequent invasion of Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. He reminds us of the immediate reaction on the streets of London and on Ivy League campuses in America. These protests were not entreaties for peace, but calls for the eradication of Israel. Within days of the massacre, student groups at Harvard issued a joint statement expressing solidarity with Hamas: ‘We, the undersigned student organisations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.’

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DOJ Investigating Human Trafficking Operation Involving Deported ‘Maryland Man’ Kilmar Abrego Garcia By Debra Heine

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/07/doj-investigating-human-trafficking-operation-involving-deported-maryland-man-kilmar-abrego-garcia/

The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly investigating a human trafficking operation involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the alleged MS-13 gang member and wife-beater who was deported to El Salvador in March, sparking outrage among Democrats.

As American Greatness previously reported, Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) caught Abrego Garcia driving a van full of suspected illegal aliens in Tennessee on November 30,  2022. Abrego Garcia, who did not have a valid driver’s license or proof of insurance, was caught speeding midway through a trip with seven passengers from the Texas border to Maryland. Garcia reportedly told police they’d been working construction in Missouri. THP detained the crew until the FBI under then-Director Christopher Wray directed the officers to release them, law enforcement sources told the Tennessee Star, last month.

Now ABC News reports that federal investigators have recently questioned a convicted felon in at the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Alabama, about his connections to Abrego Garcia.

The inmate, Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes(38), was the registered owner of the van Abrego Garcia was driving when he was stopped by THP in late 2022. With a lawyer present and the promise of partial immunity, Hernandez-Reyes reportedly told federal investigators that he had hired Garcia on “multiple occasions” to transport illegal aliens from Texas to various locations in the United States.

Hernandez-Reyes, who allegedly met Garcia in 2015, told investigators that he had previously operated a “taxi service” based in Baltimore.

Garcia crossed the border into the United States illegally in 2011 and claimed he had to flee El Salvador to escape gang violence when he was arrested in 2019.

Body camera footage of the 2022 traffic stop shows a Tennessee trooper telling a fellow officer “he’s hauling these people for money.”

Despite their well founded suspicions, and the fact that Garcia was driving without a valid license or proof of insurance, Abrego Garcia and his passengers were allowed to drive on with just a warning.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Would the Left Finally Explain the Inexplicable? The left broke norms, erased borders, and weaponized justice—not to govern, but to crush Trump and cling to power by any means necessary. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/08/would-the-left-finally-explain-the-inexplicable/

Somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens were invited into the United States by the Biden administration.

As far as logistics go, Biden could not flee Afghanistan without getting 13 Marines killed and abandoning to the terrorist Taliban $50 billion in munitions, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300 million retrofitted huge airbase.

But Biden and his handlers proved far more logistically capable when their target was fellow Americans.

After all, they somehow managed to stop the congressionally approved continuance of the border wall, to subvert federal immigration law, to emasculate the border patrol, and to ensure that millions of people around the world could simply walk into the U.S. illegally, unaudited and with impunity.

But why did Biden or his puppeteers do something so anarchic, so injurious to their fellow Americans?

Why cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars in massive new entitlements?

Why swamp the social services of our own poor citizens?

Why turn loose half a million criminal aliens and gang members to prey on our own weak and defenseless?

Was the idea to alter the demography in one fell swoop? To grow the dependent class, thereby expanding government?

Was it pure spite born of hatred of half the country?

Was it to ensure future constituencies, given that the Democratic agenda no longer appeals to most Americans?

Was it a globalist gambit to demonstrate borders are anachronistic?

Was it to fast-track new voters under the laxity of post-2020 early- and mail-in voting protocols?

Those who perpetrated the greatest ruse in American presidential history by staging the Biden presidency will never tell us what their ultimate agenda was.