Displaying posts published in

May 2025

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

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

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.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

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

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.

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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

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.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

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

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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Great Simmering in the West By J.B. Shurk

By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/the_great_simmering_in_the_west.html

So-called ‘elites’ have built a dark and volatile world.

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.  

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.  

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Qatar & Influence Operations and Saudi Arabia & Influence Operations Let’s refresh. Diana West

By on May 16th, 2025

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/qatar-and-influence-operations-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2175125&post_id=163628450&utm

Before there was Qatar & influence operations, there was Saudi Arabia & influence operations. If it is Qatar is in the headlines for buying politicians, media, universities, and for its terrorist connections, Saudi Arabia was making the same headlines and more (anyone remember 9/11?) a few years ago. Don’t look now, but Saudi’s Alwaleed bin Talal is a constant player. For starters, he was Fox’s No. 2 owner then, and he is Twitter’s No 2 owner today. Meanwhile, according to Forbes, Qatar threw a few hundred million dollars into Elon’s Twitter purchase as well. Who knows?

Maybe, we are all Qataris now.

How did this happen? Some rather important part of it starts with Alwaleed’s buy into the leading American conservative media network, Fox News, over twenty years ago. The Saudi stake would grow to 7 percent, second only to holdings of the Murdoch family. I am posting a syndicated newspaper column I wrote on the subject in 2010. The whole thing bothered me then as it all bothers me, and greatly in this week of Trump’s Arabian Processional, about which I will have more to say. For now, the 2010 column, posted below, will serve as a refresher course — and for me, as well.

I will note that this column and hundreds more are collected in my 2013 book, No Fear.

Should Fox News register with the State Department as a foreign agent — an agent of Saudi Arabia? by Diana West, February 7, 2010

First off, is that a farfetched question? Not when a leading member of the ruling family of the Sharia-totalitarian “kingdom” of Saudi Arabia, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, has made himself the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Fox News’ parent company.

Just as Steven Emerson believes that American universities using Saudi mega-millions (many from Alwaleed) to set up Islamic studies departments should register as Saudi agents, I believe an American news channel part-owned and part-influenced by the Saudi prince should, too.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

At Home With the Holocaust A scholarly exploration of the complex ways traumatic memory is passed intergenerationally. by Danusha V. Goska

By on May 16th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/at-home-with-the-holocaust/

On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book’s goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

In an online biography, author Wilson says, “I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary.” On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with “Pronouns: he/him/his.” In an interview, Wilson says, “My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred.” Christians have “genocidal intentions” toward GLBT people, Jews, and “Indigenous folks in North America.”

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. “I have received several fellowships and awards for my work.” An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi’s Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book “makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I’m a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn’t give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Unveils “America First National Security 2.0” During Visit to the Arabian Gulf In Riyadh, Trump unveiled an “America First 2.0” doctrine—favoring trade over war, diplomacy over regime change, and peace through prosperity in a new world order. By Fred Fleitz

By on May 16th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/16/trump-unveils-america-first-national-security-2-0-during-visit-to-the-arabian-gulf/

President Trump’s trip this week to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a great success for many reasons. The trip was also historic due to a speech he gave in Saudi Arabia outlining his America First foreign policy, which could transform global security.

In this speech, delivered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 13, Trump unveiled his second-term approach to foreign policy that might be called “America First National Security 2.0.”

Most of Trump’s America First approach to U.S. foreign affairs is well known. He has called for putting the interests of our country and the American people first in national security policies. Trump wants a strong military but has pledged to use military force prudently to keep our country out of new and unnecessary wars. He has condemned bad treaties favored by the foreign policy establishment, like the Paris Climate Accord, that will have no effect on the global climate but will do serious damage to the American economy.

In his Riyadh speech, President Trump doubled down on his previous America First national security policies with a revolutionary plan to promote stability and peace through economic prosperity in the Middle East and around the world. Deputy opinion editor of Newsweek Batya Ungar-Sargon explained the significance of this speech in a May 13 tweet.

“Anyone hoping to understand President Trump’s foreign policy should watch his whole speech, probably the most momentous foreign policy address of my lifetime. Trump is building a new world order. I would encourage our allies to watch it closely so as not to miss out on what could turn out to be a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

The central theme of Trump’s “new world order” is promoting global security through trade and prosperity. The president said he favored “commerce, not chaos” and a new Middle East that “exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence.”

To facilitate this vision, President Trump noted that the sophisticated and gleaming cities of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were built by visionary Arab leaders who developed their countries in their own ways and consistent with their heritages. He stressed that these countries succeeded due to the hard work of their citizens and not because of Western military intervention, nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.

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