NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump-Musk: Revolutionary Method, Restoration Plan by Amir Taheri

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21511/trump-musk-restoration

The ultimate goal of this new oligarchy is to privatize government, a concept that is anathema to European intellectuals who regard the Hobbesian state as an earthly version of divinity.

To Americans, however, the Leviathan, though accepted as a necessity, has always been regarded as a potential threat to freedoms that their ancestors sought as they fled from European tyrannies.

Whether their restoration scheme works or not remains to be seen. But to question its legitimacy is a sign of sour grapes by European gurus who witness their politically correct world crumbling around them.

“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election, which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.

France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs, as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin, and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The answer to the question may be simple: Trump is doing what he is doing because he promised to do those things and has a contract with the 78 million Americans who voted for him.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It was the woke elites who ‘purged’ America’s museums, not Donald Trump Don’t believe the media hysteria: Trump’s executive order on history and truth deals a welcome blow for sanity. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/29/it-was-the-woke-elites-who-purged-americas-museums-not-donald-trump/

This month’s Doublespeak Award goes to the BBC. President Trump is spearheading a ‘purge’ of America’s top museums, it breathlessly reports. The madman in the White House has instructed the Smithsonian Institution to put back all ‘memorials and statues’ that were ‘improperly removed’ from federal property in recent years, the Beeb says. Hold up. Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but isn’t a purge when you tear monuments down, not when you put them back up?

Yes, a new Orwellian diktat has dropped: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reversing a purge is a purge. What the BBC and others are madly calling Trump’s ‘purge’ is outlined in his latest executive order. It’s titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It ‘targets’ the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees 21 museums in the US, 17 of which are in Washington, DC. It tells the Smithsonian to cut out the ‘anti-American ideology’, resist any exhibitions that ‘divide Americans by race’, and restore monuments that were toppled or hidden away in the service of woke ideology over the past five years.

Shorter version: stop purging. Imagine how drunk on the Kool-Aid of anti-Trumpism you would need to be to describe a plea to museums to stop erasing American history and stop hiding American artefacts as a ‘purge’. The clue is in the name, people: the order is about ‘restoring’ things, not purging them. It says the Smithsonian and its museums were once ‘global icon[s] of cultural achievement’, but of late they’ve fallen under the sway of ‘a divisive, race-centred ideology’ that depicts ‘American and Western values as inherently harmful’. And that stops now, it says.

Come on, this is not a McCarthyite stab at cleansing museums of ‘progressive’ thinking – it’s an effort to reverse the McCarthyism of those woke ideologues who cleansed DC’s wonderful museums of their traditional mission and even of some of their objects.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

Genesis 1:28. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Michael Ordman discloses Israel’s baby boom even during wartime. This fact is heartwarming when major nations are experiencing a population loss. It is a spiritual call that Judaism will survive and thrive.  And indeed, Israel subdues famine, thirst and illness with myriad  dazzling technologies and therapies. Read it all.  rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR

Israel’s baby boom. (TY Dov) In the midst of war, Israel is experiencing a baby boom. Unlike post-war birth surges, Israel had a 7% increase in births since Sep 2023, with 181,000 babies born in 2024. Maternity wards are overflowing even with economic and security challenges. And the highest increase is in front line towns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SYj6orAwk

https://israel-currents.quora.com/Israeli-Jewish-Birth-Rates-Boom-In-Response-To-War

https://theettingerreport.com/2025-jewish-demographic-momentum-in-israel/

From Nova party to Mea Shearim. When Hamas attacked the Nova party revelers on 7 Oct 2023, Barak Nixon hid in a chemical toilet stall for 8 hours. He promised that if he got out of there alive, he would become religious. He subsequently moved to Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox area of Jerusalem. This is his story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_DeWoSuGMc

Off-road security vehicles for Samaria. Israel’s Settlements and National Missions Ministry delivered 21 off-road “Ranger” vehicles to Jewish farmers in the Samaria region. The vehicles were provided in cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command, which includes Judea and Samaria.

https://www.jns.org/edited-pub-wed-israeli-govt-supplies-off-road-security-vehicles-to-samaria-farmers/

Iron Dome latest tests. Israel completed comprehensive flight tests of the Iron Dome missile defense system. The exercises, conducted by the Israel Missile Defense Organization and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, evaluated the system’s effectiveness against advanced threats, including rockets, cruise missiles and drones.

https://www.jns.org/israels-iron-dome-missile-defense-system-passes-most-significant-ever-flight-tests/

Ambassadors tour southern Israel. Dozens of ambassadors from foreign countries in Israel participated in a tour of southern Israel. It exposed them to the damage caused to the Gaza Envelope and rehabilitation efforts. Ambassadors included from the Netherlands, Argentina, Guatemala, Belgium, Greece, Cyprus and others.

https://www.jns.org/wire/dozens-of-ambassadors-tour-southern-israel-witnessing-impact-of-war-on-the-gaza-envelope/

Riding for resilience. More than 100 bicyclists are participating in the ninth annual Geerz “Israel Charity Ride” from March 23-25 – a two-day mountain-biking event aimed at raising funds to offer relief and resilience-building opportunities for 450+ children affected by trauma due to the war.

https://www.jns.org/wire/riding-for-resilience-100-plus-bicyclists-unite-to-support-mental-health-for-israeli-youth/

New hotels open in a war. In 2024, despite the war and thanks to grants provided by the Israel Ministry of Tourism to entrepreneurs, 483 new hotel rooms were added to the hotel supply across the country, and four new hotels were established, expanded, or converted. During 2025, 18 new hotels are expected to be added.

https://www.israel21c.org/new-hotels-opening-in-israel-this-year/

MEDIA Comments turned off

Rhetoric, Lies, and the Media: A Quintilian Perspective on Modern Journalism The media distorts reality, twisting Trump’s actions into tyranny while excusing its own abuses—an artful exercise in deception and bias. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/30/rhetoric-lies-and-the-media-a-quintilian-perspective-on-modern-journalism/

Where’s Quintilian when you need him? The author of the twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria (c. AD 95) knew all there was to know about rhetoric, “the art,” as Aristotle said, “of persuasion.” Quintilian’s chief concern was with turning out able and virtuous orators. But in the course of his inquiries, he also analyzed the workings of deceitful or fraudulent oratory. What a rich hunting ground our dishonest media today would have given the old Roman!

It is amusing to speculate on what Quintilian might have made of The New York Times, for example, a recent story in our former paper of record titled “Elon Musk Is South African. We Shouldn’t Forget It.” Musk left his native South Africa in the late 1980s. He never looked back. But according to the Times, Musk was irredeemably tainted by the racial policies of South Africa. He is, the Times  informed its readers, “a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa.” Really?

What follows is an extraordinary web of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies. Quintilian would have delighted in explaining how it all works.

He would also have found much to work with in “Trump’s Assault on Elites Encompasses Almost Every Aspect of American Life,” Stephen Collinson’s recent essay for CNN. Considered simply as an exercise in mendacious rhetoric, it deserves some sort of prize. I think of it as Mary McCarthy thought of Lillian Hellmann. When asked by Dick Cavett what she found to be dishonest about Hellmann, McCarthy said, “Everything. I once said in an interview that everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

So it is with Collinson’s flaccid but scuttling effort to attack Donald Trump.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The AOC Train Wreck is Coming, and it’s Going to Be Spectacular Nationwide rallies are spurring “Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez 2028” whispers, and it’s already clear: the CIA couldn’t do a better job of discrediting the American left Matt Taibbi

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.racket.news/p/the-aoc-train-wreck-is-coming-and

From the New York Times Sunday article, “As the Left Looks to 2028, It Waits on Ocasio-Cortez’s Big Decision.”

As Democrats find… their party’s popularity at a generational low, progressives are also staring down the prospect of a post-Bernie future… The 83-year-old Mr. Sanders has signaled that he does not intend to run for president again. The question now is who will lead the network he built from scratch into the next presidential election…

Virtually everyone interviewed said there was one clear leader for the job: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Hoo, boy. Making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. Vogue’s “Consummate Power Dresser”) the face of a left populist movement is the latest episode of the longest-running television show in history, How Will the American Left Screw Up This Time? It’s an instant entrant in the Hall of Fame of Bad Ideas, on par with a Hitler bobblehead day promotion or training orangutans to pack flatware. This will not end well:

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Garnett Trump Was Right to Kill the EV Mandate Scrapping the EPA’s draconian tailpipe-emissions rule will boost competition, benefit consumers, and strengthen national security.

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-epa-electric-vehicle-mandate-tailpipe-emissions-rule

In his March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump celebrated terminating Joe Biden’s “insane electric vehicle mandate.” A year ago, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency had finalized a rule, nominally about tailpipe emissions, that would have required 30 percent to 56 percent of all new light-duty consumer cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles (EVs). Trump announced his intention to undo Biden’s EV overreach in his first week in office, as part of his executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy.”

Biden’s rule would have brought chaos to the automotive industry, caused significant economic harm to millions of Americans, and put U.S. national security at risk. Repealing it will level the playing field in the EV market in ways that will benefit American consumers. According to Kelley Blue Book, the cheapest gasoline car available in America in 2025, the Nissan Versa, costs $18,300. The cheapest EV, the Nissan Leaf, costs $29,280—a staggering 60 percent more expensive.

The logistics of owning an EV are also complicated and time-consuming. EV chargers need to be installed at homes and apartment complexes, and charging a car can take more than 12 hours, compared with the less than five minutes it takes to fill up a tank of gas. The Leaf EV can travel 149 miles on a full charge; the Versa can go more than 375 miles on a full tank of gas, over 150 percent farther.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Columbia’s President Resigns, But the DEI Battle Is Just Beginning The campus diversity regime, at the Ivy League school and elsewhere, won’t go down without a fight.

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbias-president-resigns-but-the-dei-battle-is-just-beginning

With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?

The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.

The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests,. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.

Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.

Th irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.

IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump Secured Border for Only 0.2% of the Cost of the Border Crisis Media hypes cost of securing border, refuses to discuss the cost of open borders. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-secured-border-for-only-0-2-of-the-cost-of-the-border-crisis/

The media has some big news.

Southwest border mission has cost $330M so far — with over $40M for Guantanamo Bay alone – ABC News

Interesting. Let’s even for the moment assume that those numbers are accurate. What was the cost of the border crisis?

The House Budget Committee estimated the cost of the crisis at $150 billion. Others put it at $200 billion or even higher.

$330 million would be around 0.2% of $150 billion.

Some estimates set the annual cost of illegal migration at $150 billion as well.

To put that $330 million into context, under Biden, DHS allocated $380 million for migrant-infested areas through FEMA in August 2024.

We’re spending a fraction on an ounce of prevention here to secure the border.

The media hypes the cost of securing border, but refuses to discuss the cost of open borders.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Snow White is Dead Disney is having a very bad time at the box office. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/snow-white-is-dead/

There’s bad news in fairyland. Snow White isn’t white. The Queen is the fairest of all. And after eating from the woke apple, Snow White is so dead that all the mocap CG dwarves in the Mouse House can’t begin to raise her. Neither can Prince Charming who now identifies as a woman.

After last weekend’s poor opening, there was a scramble in Hollywood to deny that wokeness was the cause, followed by prognostications that this weekend would fix all. The Friday numbers are in and while the weekend numbers aren’t set yet and certainly not final, they’re catastrophically bad

A Working Man, the latest Jason Statham male-skewed action movie, walloped Snow White Badly. To make matters worse, Friday numbers actually have Snow White behind ‘The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1’.

While Snow White may not actually end up in third place, it was struggling to keep pace even with The Woman in the Yard horror movie.

Making matters even more depressing, Captain Un-America, Brave New World, fell 91% to a miserable 7th place.

Again those numbers may not end up holding, but at the moment Disney’s spring is off to a really bad start.

It’s not just about the numbers, which are bad enough, but the per theater average which registers enthusiasm.

Disney’s Snow White had the highest number of theaters, monopolizing 4,200 theaters, but its per-theater average was below $1,000, putting in 5th place for public enthusiasm. And Captain Un-America in 9th place with a $306 per theater average and still short of $200 million.

Disney’s IP spam is no longer looking like a solid bet for theater owners and that’s really bad news for the mouse.

BOOKS Comments turned off

“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book” Sydney Williams

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.