RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/tariffs-good-trump-china

Donald Trump is back—and so is the tariff. “It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?” the president quipped before the joint session of Congress on Tuesday—so beautiful that he referenced tariffs 17 more times in his address. In the short time since his second inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump has imposed—and sometimes walked back or temporarily suspended—tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico, and declared a policy of tit-for-tat “reciprocity” or retaliation for any foreign tariffs on American exports that are higher than U.S. tariffs on imports. And he has justified tariffs with multiple rationales, ranging from protecting or reshoring defense-critical American industries to pressuring America’s neighbors to take action to reduce the cross-border flow of illegal immigrants and drugs like fentanyl. In fact, he told members of Congress, tariffs were “about protecting the soul of our country.”

The chaotic and inconsistent nature of Trump’s second-term policy to date can be criticized. But when it comes to tariffs as a tool of economic statecraft in general, the gap between establishment rhetoric and actual government practice is big enough to drive a Chinese EV through.

The audiences of the dying legacy media are told that the tariff is a destructive policy revived by politicians like Trump who fail to understand elementary economics, which teaches that free trade benefits all sides all the time everywhere, with no exceptions. But from North America to Europe to Asia, developed countries are ignoring mainstream economists and their amen corner in the subsidized libertarian think tank world and slapping tariffs onto imports in favored industries like electric vehicles and renewable energy. Governments are resorting to tariffs and industrial policy, not because their prime ministers and presidents flunked Econ 101, but because they do not want their economies deindustrialized by a flood of low-priced, state-subsidized Chinese imports.

The Chinese import threat is why Canada has levied a 100% tariff on imported Chinese EVs, along with a 25% surtax on Chinese steel and Chinese aluminum. The European Union has slapped electric vehicles made in China with tariffs ranging from 7.8% to 35.3%, on top of the standard European tariff of 10% for imported automobiles. India imposes tariffs of 70%-100% on imported electric vehicles from China and other countries.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-columbia-deport-hamas

Manhattan is home to one less terror-supporter.

On Saturday, immigration enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national with U.S. permanent resident status, and removed him to a detention facility in Louisiana. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson explained that Khalil’s arrest, in coordination with the State Department, was made “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and because Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” A hearing is set for Wednesday after a federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation on Monday—but the White House has doubled down on its intent to deport him.

Khalil was arrested at his Columbia University-owned apartment, near the school where he’s spent much of the last year and a half as a student leading pro-Hamas demonstrations. He has been a ringleader of the anti-Semitic activity that has kept Columbia in lockdown, and has helped escalate disorder at its sister school, Barnard College.

Khalil’s removal offers a lesson that the free world has been reluctant to learn since the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel: sometimes expulsion is the best solution. This is especially true for those who commit the kinds of anonymous violence that have characterized the anti-Israel movement at Columbia and Barnard, and which Khalil, as a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has helped propel.

Khalil has been candid about his commitment to make Columbia uninhabitable until the university denounces Israel. “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” he declared. At Columbia, that “resist[ance]” has involved everything from erecting encampments on school property to directing death wishes at Zionists to storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and taking maintenance staff hostage.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/the-demowhigs-race-to-extinction/

Once upon a time, there was an esteemed American political party called the Whig Party. It was one of the two great American political parties of its time. It stood alongside the Democratic Party in the mid-19th century and produced four U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. It also enjoyed the membership of other eminent American political leaders, like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Quincy Adams. Notwithstanding these great achievements, however, the Whig Party managed to destroy itself and was dissolved in 1854, just 21 years after its founding. Could today’s Democratic Party be on the same path to extinction as the Whigs?

It certainly seems that today’s Democratic Party’s “brain trust,” such as it is, is either utterly hapless or has a conservative mole within its ranks deliberately engineering the destruction of the party through the incomprehensible stances it is taking. Given that political conservatives, of which I count myself, are historically terrible at devising Machiavellian tactics against their opponents, I’m guessing there is no mole. Democrats are simply foundering in the wake of a force of nature called Donald Trump, who is simply brilliant at tapping into the sentiments of the majority of the American people and turning his political opponents’ weaknesses against themselves.

To be fair, Trump is benefiting from Democratic policy positions that, on almost every issue, are 180 degrees out of phase with most of the American people and with common sense.

Beginning with the administration of Barack Hussein Obama—that inscrutable, rising-out-of-nowhere community organizer, whose background is still largely a mystery to most of us—the Democratic Party began to take positions on matters of public policy that were real head-scratchers.