NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Hegseth’s Reforms Are What the Army Needs By Will Thibeau

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/hegseths-reforms-are-what-the-army-needs/

On May 1, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth executed what may be remembered as the most significant act of institutional reform in the American military since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. In a single memo, Hegseth initiated a reorganization of the Army that consolidates command structures, dismantles legacy programs, eliminates bureaucratic dead weight, and restores merit-based advancement. More importantly, it repudiates the reigning progressive orthodoxy that has turned the Pentagon into a symbol of regime decadence rather than national defense.

This reformation, co-led by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, reflects not only a strategic shift in military doctrine but a philosophical realignment away from managerial liberalism toward a more classical understanding of executive leadership. It is the kind of executive decisiveness that critics of the administrative state, from James Burnham to Angelo Codevilla, have long argued is necessary to break the inertia of our postmodern bureaucracies. This was not reform by committee. It was an assertion of will.

From Bureaucracy to Battlefield

The Army that Hegseth inherited was shaped by the long war on terror — an era of dispersed, low-intensity conflict that encouraged bureaucratic sprawl and doctrinal stagnation. In 2001, there were 871 generals and admirals serving throughout the Armed Forces. Today, there are roughly 950 — nearly a 10% growth, even though the total force has shrunk by roughly the same percentage over the same period. As War on the Rocks noted in a 2022 piece, this top-heavy structure created a glut of careerists more concerned with promotion boards than combat readiness.

The May 1 directive cuts approximately 40 general officer billets and up to 1,000 civilian staff roles at the Pentagon. In their place, Hegseth has emphasized agile command-and-control, streamlined formations, and the integration of unmanned systems. The retirement of legacy equipment like the Humvee and outdated rotary-wing platforms reflects a sober recognition that great power competition — not counterinsurgency — is now the defining strategic reality.

This modernization is long overdue. A 2021 RAND study found that the U.S. military’s acquisition system “incentivizes risk aversion and conformity,” resulting in a procurement timeline that often stretches over decades. The pivot toward off-the-shelf, commercially adaptable unmanned platforms represents not only a technological update, but a repudiation of the failed industrial-consultant complex that has long dominated defense acquisition.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Toward a Negotiated Settlement of the Trump-Harvard Showdown After freezing billions in funding, the Trump administration pushes Harvard to curb antisemitism and racial bias—sparking a legal showdown over free speech and federal overreach. By Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/06/toward-a-negotiated-settlement-of-the-trump-harvard-showdown/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Autism -– An Ignored Medical Crisis By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

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

The dramatic rise in autism prevalence over the past few decades is nothing short of alarming.

What exactly is autism? I ask this because when I was a child, it was so rare that none of us had ever heard of or known anyone with it.The Autism Speaks website defines autism thus:

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. 

A few decades ago, autism was rare, but then it rose meteorically. “Reported rates of autism in the United States increased from < 3 per 10,000 children in the 1970s to > 30 per 10,000 children in the 1990s, a 10-fold increase.”

Since the 1990s, we have seen another tenfold increase. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 31 children and 1 in 45 adults in the United States today.

In just two generations, the prevalence of autism has risen 100-fold. Was there a similar explosion for any other medical or public health condition?

Can this 1,000 percent increase be explained by genetics, as some doctors suggest? 

A 100-fold increase in two generations—roughly 40 years—defies the principles of genetic evolution, which operates on timescales spanning centuries, not decades. This unprecedented rise points to environmental factors, including food additives, medicines, vaccines, and other toxins, as the primary drivers of the autism epidemic.

Genetics likely plays some role in autism. Twin studies suggest that autism’s heritability ranges from 60% to 90%, indicating a strong genetic component.

However, genetic changes do not occur quickly enough to explain a 100-fold increase in prevalence within two generations, only two reproductive cycles.

Evolution through genetic mutation and natural selection is a gradual process that often requires thousands of years to produce significant changes at the population level.

No one would attribute the increase in obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases over the past few decades to genetics instead of environmental factors like diet and exercise. Autism is exhibiting a similar trend.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Eats Itself By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

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

Western governments undermine elections, religious freedom, free markets, and free speech.

The same Western leaders who speak endlessly about “protecting Democracy” continue to rig elections, outlaw political parties, and prosecute candidates.  Germany has declared Alternative for Germany — now the country’s most popular party — an “extremist group” on par with domestic terror organizations.  The European Union helped Marxist globalists in Romania invalidate a presidential election and ban the winner from office.  France and Brazil have followed the U.S. example of bringing ludicrous criminal charges against popular anti-Establishment politicians, and while President Trump overcame the sham prosecutions targeting him, Marine Le Pen and Jair Bolsonaro are fighting just to survive. 

Let’s not forget either that the Ukraine-Russia War drags on today only because U.S. and European forces helped overthrow the legitimately elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, back in 2014.  His transgression?  Yanukovych’s government was pushing back against the EU’s efforts to absorb Ukraine into its continental empire.  The same NATO and EU talking-heads who denounce Russia’s conquest of its neighbor are mostly mad because they hoped to conquer Ukraine first.

It’s a disorienting time for Westerners who once respected their civic institutions.  The Cold War mentality of the twentieth century created clear distinctions between closed, communist systems and rights-based, free societies.  In the West, people could freely practice the religious tenets of their respective faiths; in communist societies, people were expected to obey the quasi-divine strictures of the State.  In the West, people could own property and freely exchange goods and services; in communist societies, people owned nothing and received only what the State gave them.  In the West, people could speak their minds and publicly debate new ideas; in communist societies, people adhered to politically correct ideology under the constant threat of arrest, torture, and even death.  The West was supposed to err on the side of individual freedoms, even when those freedoms permitted awful people to say awful things. 

Western societies did not always live up to the principles that distinguished them from totalitarian regimes, but respect for personal freedom did serve as an effective guardrail that kept Western governments from careening toward totalitarianism, too.  

What’s going on today is entirely different.  

ELECTIONS, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The delicious media meltdown over Reform’s success The media elites’ hissy fit over the local-election results is a hilarious rage of the entitled. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/05/the-delicious-media-meltdown-over-reforms-success/

The BBC’s mask didn’t so much slip on Friday as completely disintegrate. When Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservative Party, was elected the Reform UK mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, the Beeb put out one of the weirdest and most telling tweets of recent times. Jenkyns’s victory marks ‘a return to politics for the former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’, it said. Greggs worker? Heaven forfend! You could almost hear the sloshing of spilt macchiatos as the Oxbridge tits of the BBC’s social-media team clocked that someone who once served sausage rolls to the hard-up was now a mayor.

It was undiluted class snobbery. It was a sly jeer designed to get the Beeb’s more middle-class readership chortling with gleeful derision at the thought of such riff-raff-coded people now running the country. I was just a ‘Saturday kid’ at Greggs, when ‘I was 16’, protested Jenkyns. Others pointed out that she’s since been a Conservative MP and even a minister in both Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. Doesn’t matter, guys. Thirty-five years ago she heated up Cornish pasties for hungry working-class people and in the eyes of the BBC that makes her a strange and possibly unsuitable person for high politics.

The Beeb deleted the tweet. Maybe someone’s knuckles were rapped. But we could all see what was happening here. For the benefit of non-British readers, Greggs is a bakery that serves piping-hot pastries and sweet treats. It is especially popular on high streets in ‘left behind’ towns. And it has become shorthand among the chattering classes who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘oik’ anymore. Make no mistake – when the Beeb said ‘former Greggs worker’, rather than ‘former minister’, it was implying that Jenkyns has rubbed shoulders with wrong’uns; with the little folk who not only voted for Brexit but, worse, also prefer a Greggs chicken bake to a salmon and spinach brioche roll from Benugo.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Takes on a Globalist Trading System Rigged Against the U.S. Other nations use non-tariff trade barriers as weapons to choke off American exports. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/trump-takes-on-a-globalist-trading-system-rigged-against-the-u-s/

For decades, U.S. presidents and congressional leaders from both parties rolled over and accepted global trading arrangements that have put the United States at a great disadvantage. The result is that the United States had a $1.2 trillion goods trade deficit in 2024, the largest of which has been with China.  

A fact sheet issued by the White House on April 2nd explains the stakes in what amounts to other countries’ economic attacks on America: “Large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits have led to the hollowing out of our manufacturing base; resulted in a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity; undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.”

President Trump has decided that enough is enough. He is using America’s enormous leverage to pressure its trading partners to ditch their unfair trade barriers and level the playing field. The White House fact sheet calls this “the golden rule on trade: Treat us like we treat you.”

America’s trading partners have imposed tariffs on U.S. goods imported into their countries that are far steeper than the tariffs that the U.S. has imposed on their goods. Even more insidiously, America’s trading partners have erected high non-tariff trade barriers that stifle U.S. companies’ access to their markets. These countries also flood the U.S.’s far more open markets with goods at prices subsidized by foreign governments that American companies cannot compete with.

BOOKS Comments turned off

War, Men, and the Soul of the West An interview with ‘A Rage to Conquer’ author Michael Walsh. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/war-men-and-the-soul-of-the-west/

“War – what is it good for? Absolutely nothin’,” sang The Temptations. “War is not the answer,” declares the familiar bumper sticker.

But that depends on what the question is, doesn’t it? If the question is, how do you stop an imperialistic movement from bringing the whole continent of Europe under its totalitarian sway, then war is indeed a pretty valid answer. If your citizens are being relentlessly bombarded with rockets and terror attacks from an enemy with whom you have tried every conceivable diplomatic solution for literally decades, and their very raison d’etre, as explicitly noted in their charter, is to eradicate your people and erase your country from the map – I’m looking at you, Hamas – then war begins to sound like the best and only answer.

War is an ugly thing, but it’s not the ugliest of things, as John Stuart Mill said. Indeed, in his  latest book A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History, Michael Walsh makes a compelling case for the centrality of war in shaping the cultural, political, and spiritual contours of the West. He goes beyond traditional military history to weave literary, cultural, and philosophical threads into a narrative marked by his signature erudition, storytelling passion, and deep reverence for the martial spirit (I reviewed it here).

Journalist, novelist, political pundit, and screenwriter Walsh is the author of, among his 17 or 18 books, two essential ones on cultural Marxism which I also have reviewed – The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and The Fiery Angel. The provocative Walsh has also appeared a couple of times on my podcast at the Horowitz Freedom Center, The Right Take with Mark Tapson (listen here and here).

I’m honored to say Michael Walsh has been a friend for many years. He is a brilliant writer with the most wide-ranging intellect and interests of probably anyone I know. I sat down with him recently to talk about A Rage to Conquer and about history, warfare, masculinity, and current events.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

British reporter who exposed BBC documentary’s Hamas links faces vandalism David Isaac

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/british-reporter-who-exposed-bbc-documentarys-hamas-links-faces-vandalism/

British investigative journalist David Collier learned while in Israel last week that his car had been vandalized outside his London home.

He received a “frantic call” from his wife in the early afternoon of May 27 about the incident, in which a chemical, perhaps paint thinner, had been splashed on his vehicle in five or six places.

It’s not the first time his car has been vandalized. A few weeks ago, Collier discovered that someone had keyed the driver’s side of his car. Keying is when a sharp object is used to scratch a car’s exterior, damaging the paint.

Collier dismissed the first incident as perhaps the work of a drunk stumbling through the neighborhood. The second incident left no doubt in his mind that he had been targeted. The Metropolitan Police drew the same conclusion, “logging it as a racially aggravated attack,” he said.

Collier, still in Israel, spoke to JNS while waiting outside a store selling self-defense products in the hopes of finding something he could legally bring back with him. There are strict rules in Britain against selling such products. “No self-defense equipment is allowed in the U.K. I can’t even hold pepper spray in my own home,” he said.

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Settlers: An Incomplete Portrayal By John Aziz *****

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/05/06/the-settlers-an-incomplete-portrayal-louis-theroux-settlers-israel-palestine/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Louis Theroux’s new documentary suggests that he is unfamiliar with the complex history behind the Israeli occupation of The West Bank, and does not understand the political and ideological factors at stake there.

I watched the latest Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers with the same apprehension with which I approach most Western media output relating to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. There is nothing quite like the capacity of well-meaning Westerners to grossly misunderstand and miss crucial pieces of the puzzle in regard to the history and context of why Israelis and Palestinians are fighting one another.

While the war between Hamas and Israel has dominated most headlines over the past eighteen months, this particular documentary focuses instead on Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, and particularly on the growth in Israeli civilian settlements since 1967, when the Jewish state captured the West Bank from Jordan in the Six Day War. 

Today, there are over 700,000 Jewish Israelis living there, residing in upwards of 279 settlements, which range from what are effectively modern cities like Maale Adumim and Modi’in Illit, with tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, to ad hoc hilltop encampments made up of tents, sheds, and tin-roofed shacks, housing just a few families.

I’ve had some personal experience of life in the West Bank, because the Palestinian side of my family is from there, and I have visited on multiple occasions, generally staying for months at a time. On my travels, I made excursions into Palestinian cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin.

Of course, I’ve only seen life from the Palestinian side of the fences. I have never been into an Israeli settlement. Palestinians and Israelis may live in the same land, but we inhabit different worlds, separated not only by fences but by language, religion, and culture—and that is part of the problem. By talking to each other and trying to understand one another, we might be able to build better relationships and forge connections that could transcend the conflict and ultimately end this tragic, horrific, nightmarish fight.

I would appreciate a documentary that gave me a window into a world that I have not been able to see in person and helped me empathise with the people on the other side. Louis Theroux’s documentary did not do that. Instead, it left me frustrated and deflated. Theroux’s settler interviewees were a selection of nasty extremists who lurched between denying the existence of Palestinians and expressing the desire to conquer more land and drive out the Arab inhabitants. Most bizarrely of all, the documentary contains a series of segments with settler leader Daniella Weiss which culminate in her physically assaulting Theroux by pushing and shoving him. Theroux tries to put this in context by interviewing Palestinian activist Issa Amro from Hebron, who explains, “They don’t see us as equal human beings who deserve the same rights as they do.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

There Goes Antarctica

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/06/there-goes-antarctica/

The ice sheet at the bottom of our planet is not cooperating with the global warming narrative.

Our southernmost continent is, we’ve been told, the suffocating canary in the global coal mine. The more ice loss in Antarctica, the greater trouble we’re in. So what do we make of a study which found that between 2021 and 2023, there was a record-breaking increase in the Antarctic Ice Sheet?

We mark it down as another in a long line of misses from the global warming zealots.

“Notably, four major glaciers in the Wilkes Land–Queen Mary Land region of East Antarctica reversed their previous pattern of accelerated mass loss from 2011 to 2020 and instead showed significant mass gain during the 2021 to 2023 period,” says an article in SciTechDaily summarizing the report from Tongji University researchers.

How could such an unanticipated event happen?

“The study points to anomalous precipitation as the primary driver, suggesting that natural variability plays a significant role in short-term ice sheet changes,” says climate site Watts Up With That? It also “underscores the complexity of Antarctica’s ice system and the pitfalls of oversimplified climate narratives.”

Of the latter, we’ve had more than enough.