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Ruth King

Trump needs to cut the ‘51st state’ crap The tariffs and taunts against Canada are imperialistic bullying. Sean Collins

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/18/trump-needs-to-cut-the-51st-state-crap/

It started as a joke, or so it seemed. Canada should become the 51st state, said US president Donald Trump to then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in late November. Trudeau laughed nervously, according to the Fox News report of the meeting. Two weeks later, Trump took to Truth Social to mock Trudeau as the ‘governor’ of the ‘Great State of Canada’.

Trudeau and his fellow Canadians are not laughing any more. And for good reasons. What began as a seemingly offhand quip, an idea so crazy it had to be a joke, has now caused a serious rift between the two countries.

Since Trump initiated his on-again, off-again tariffs in February, he has been constantly repeating his ‘51st state’ jibe, presenting it as a solution to his self-created trade war with Canada. This flared up again last week, when Ontario premier Doug Ford announced a 25 per cent export charge on electricity to the US. Trump responded by doubling his planned tariffs on Canadian exports of steel and aluminium to 50 per cent. Both sides then backed down.

Trump has continued to claim that Canada’s tariff problems would disappear if it became a US state. ‘As a state, it would be one of the great states’, he said. In what he must have thought was a kind gesture, Trump then added that Canada could retain its national anthem if it joined the US.

Imposing tariffs on Canadian goods is bad enough, but Trump’s demeaning ‘51st state’ talk only adds insult to injury. He has angered the Canadian people, united their political parties in patriotic opposition to him and further alienated America’s Western allies. Indeed, last week’s G7 meeting of foreign ministers was overshadowed by the question of how to respond to Trump’s threats to annex the meeting’s host, Canada.

After weeks of repeating his 51st-state ‘solution’, we must call it what it is – imperialistic bullying. Trump is behaving like a mafia boss, making an offer Canada can’t refuse: ‘Nice little country you have there – it would be a shame if someone crushed its economy.’ Trump is offering ‘protection’ to Canada – protection from the threat he created.

Samuel Hammond U.S. Companies Are Helping China Win the AI Race America must strengthen its export controls on chips.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/artificial-intelligence-china-deepseek-nvidia-broadcom-openai

How secure is America’s lead in artificial intelligence? It wasn’t long ago that the conventional wisdom put China years behind the curve. This was partly because the United States introduced export controls in 2022 and 2023 that notionally embargoed Chinese companies from the most advanced AI chips.

Today, however, most experts I speak with believe China trails the U.S. on AI by at most six to nine months—if at all. Take the sudden rise of China’s DeepSeek, the impressive AI startup that began as a hedge-fund CEO’s side project. DeepSeek shocked the markets earlier this year by releasing R1, a “reasoning model” that replicated top AI firm OpenAI’s breakthrough o1 model only a month after the latter’s unveiling, and seemingly at a fraction of the cost

OpenAI’s latest models still top the leaderboards, but only because they have access to vastly more computing resources. What DeepSeek nonetheless demonstrated is just how few technical barriers stand in the way of competing at the AI frontier. As DeepSeek’s CEO Liang Wenfeng put it in an interview last year, “money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

In practice, though, U.S. chip export controls have been incredibly leaky. Chinese buyers have circumvented the controls on a mass scale by routing chips through third parties in nearby regions, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. In other words, East Asian allies and U.S. firms are enabling the transmission of chips to a geopolitical adversary. America’s economic and military advantage depends on government stepping up to stop the flow.

The evidence for mass export-control evasion was always right under our nose. When the chip controls were first introduced in 2022, Nvidia responded by releasing a new, slightly inferior chip tailor-made for China—the H800—within weeks

Trump’s America First Tariffs How to make them fulfill American objectives with as minimal pain as possible. by Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-america-first-tariffs/

Tariffs have figured prominently in the news since President Trump returned to the White House. He says that ‘tariff’ is one of his favorite words and lauds the 25th U.S. president, William McKinley, for using tariffs to achieve his goal of protecting the American economy. President Trump has brandished the specter of tariffs as leverage in advancing his own economic and national security objectives. They include enhancing cross-border security with Canada and Mexico, reshoring manufacturing back to the United States, reducing trade deficits with U.S.’s trading partners through fairer trade agreements, protecting American workers’ jobs, and safeguarding America’s national security. But tariffs have become a rapidly moving, economically volatile issue with potentially unintended consequences and unpredictable outcomes. Tariffs can backfire badly and hurt American consumers and manufacturers if they are not carefully calibrated to ensure that their benefits clearly outweigh their costs.

On the other hand, if tariffs are used with precision against the right targets at the right time and their purpose is clearly communicated, tariffs can play a valuable role in protecting America’s economy and national security. Just the mere threat of tariffs provides great leverage in overcoming the resistance of other countries to key U.S. demands.

President Trump has scored early successes with his tariff policies. Colombia backed down and reversed its initial refusal to take back its citizens deported from the United States after the president threatened to impose steep tariffs. President Trump also threatened Canada and Mexico with 25 percent tariffs on their exports to the U.S. if they did not show considerably more progress in securing their borders with the U.S. and stopping the cross-border flow of fentanyl. The two countries immediately began to step up their efforts to do just that, in return for which President Trump agreed to delay the imposition of these tariffs for now except on aluminum and steel.

President Trump has other tariff policy objectives besides border security. Promoting fair trade between the U.S. and its trading partners is a key objective.

Can We Sacrifice for the Common Good? Solving national problems exacts a price that won’t get cheaper by ignoring them. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-we-sacrifice-for-the-common-good/\

Recently the portents of a weakening economy have continued. As the Wall Street Journal reported, “tech stocks and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply again on Monday,” and “Friday’s jobs report . . . showed employers added 151,000 jobs last month . . . half as many as in November and December.” We’re hearing more and more gloomy talk of a looming recession.

Many commentators, the Journal continued, are blaming “Mr. Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs” –– the latest on Canadian aluminum and steel––that “are weighing on business sentiment.” Trump’s measured admission that tariffs may cause “a little disturbance” and require a “period of transition” was not enough for many economists who see the more serious negative effects of raising tariffs as more important than the improvements that others say could follow correcting our negative balance-of-trade with China, Canada, and other countries.

Canada’s surplus, for example, alone was $64.26 billion in 2023. Our total trade deficit is $1trillion. Surely, eliminating such imbalances would be good for our fisc––especially those of our rich Nato partners, who until very recently have defied the 2014 obligation to spend a meager 2% of GDP on their militaries, while freeloading for decades on our military for their defense. And don’t forget Mexico’s $170 billion, and as Victor Hanson reminds us, “Mexico currently siphons off $63 billion in remittances from the U.S. economy, most of it from illegal aliens.”

So, which “experts” should we heed? First, we must acknowledge the problem with the dueling, credentialed economists who counsel government officials and inform us citizens––economics is not a science properly understood. Any discipline that involves individual, unique human beings–– with their unpredictable spontaneity, their “passions and interests,” and their power to serve both no matter how irrational, destructive, and selfish––cannot be the subject of a pure science.

Public Thinks That 25% Or More Of All Federal Spending Is Wasted: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/19/public-thinks-that-25-or-more-of-all-federal-spending-is-wasted-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have shown a high-degree of support for the cuts being made to the federal bureaucracy and spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Why? A majority across the country believe the government wastes vast amounts of their tax money, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For the March online national I&I/TIPP Poll, voters were asked the following question: “What percentage of your tax dollars do you believe is wasted by the federal government?” The possible responses included: “Less than 10%,” “10%-25%,” “26%-50%,” “51%-75%,” “More than 75%,” and “Not sure.”

It’s fair to say that Americans see a lot of their money being wasted. Among the 1,434 people who took the poll from Feb. 26-28, 52% responded that they felt more than 25% of their tax money was being wasted, with the breakdown showing 24% responding 26%-50%, 14% at 51%-75%, and another 14% guessing 76% or more.

By comparison, just 19% answered 10%-25% and only 10% agreed it was less than 10% waste. Meanwhile, “Not sure” notched 19% of the responses. (The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points).

Ruthie Blum: Striking When the Iron is Cold

http://Striking when the iron’s cold

“Operation Strength and Sword,” the airstrikes in the Gaza Strip launched at 2:15 a.m. on Tuesday, didn’t only come as a shock to Hamas. Israelis, too, were taken aback, since they went to bed on Monday night preparing for a very different battle in the morning. The internecine kind.

Yes, the protest movement declared that it would be escalating its activities. Not that it ever ceased staging rallies against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for, well, just about everything.

For months, its focus has been his failure—for ostensibly personal and political reasons—to “bring all the hostages home now.” And Tuesday marked the 11th day of a more specific demonstration, this one titled the “Kirya Envelope.”

The name is a play on the term for the Gaza-border communities. It refers to the surrounding of Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, where the security cabinet usually meets.

But the hostage crisis wasn’t the impetus for some 100 protest leaders to jump to attention. No, their latest excuse was Netanyahu’s decision to fire Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Ronen Bar.

Never mind that he was the key figure responsible for not predicting and preventing the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Forget that he even admitted as much shortly after the deadly Hamas invasion.

‘Who Is James K. Polk?’ — An Old Question Asked Again The American president who never let executive details, political infighting, or public opinion distract him from his specific goals. by Walter Borneman

https://spectator.org/who-is-james-k-polk-an-old-question-asked-again/

Who is James K. Polk?” his opponents in the 1844 presidential election mockingly asked. Two centuries later, the question is asked again more quizzically. For one thing, James K. Polk proved a president can be both a big-picture visionary and an effective manager.

Elected as a Democrat from Tennessee, Polk has long been characterized as a dark horse. In fact, he was anything but. Before becoming president, Polk served 14 years in Congress — four as Speaker of the House. He had been governor of Tennessee, a hopeful for vice president in 1840, and the apparent choice to balance presumptive Democratic nominee Martin Van Buren of New York in 1844. When Van Buren failed to be nominated in a convention divided over the annexation of Texas, Polk rode a white horse out of the chaos.

Scholarly Polk was a stickler for detail all his life. As a young attorney in Nashville, he criticized an older Sam Houston for attempting to execute a judgment from a North Carolina court that was not properly authenticated. For his part, the much looser Houston is said to have observed that Polk was “a victim of the use of water as a beverage.”

Sober and somber, Polk carried his attention to detail throughout his political career, earning respect from friends and foes alike whether he was presiding over the House of Representatives or navigating the constituencies and issues of the cutthroat politics of 19th-century Tennessee.

“I intend to be myself, President of the United States,” Polk told a Tennessee confidante after his election, discounting rumors he would be Andrew Jackson’s or anyone else’s pawn. Then, Polk took the unprecedented step of insisting his cabinet appointees pledge not only to support the Democratic platform but also refrain from seeking the presidency themselves. If you run, Polk told them, you must resign.

James K. Polk never let executive details, political infighting, or public opinion distract him from the specific goals — his “four great measures” he called them — that he enumerated for his administration: the resolution of the decades-old joint occupation of the Oregon country with Great Britain; the acquisition of California and an expanse of the Southwest from Mexico; the reduction of the tariff that stifled the southern economy; and the creation of an independent treasury system immune from national bank wars.

How the Fate of the West is Tied to the Fate of the Jewish Nation By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/how_the_fate_of_the_west_is_tied_to_the_fate_of_the_jewish_nation.html

Why is Israel alone forced to justify its existence and questioned when it stands up to those who would annihilate it?  Why was a worldwide campaign of hatred that reeked of anti-Semitism unleashed on Israel when it responded to the October 7, 2023, attack, while there was no criticism of Hamas?  Why has the U.N. censured the Jewish state more times than any other nation, even China, North Korea, and Cuba combined?

The answer runs deeper than geopolitics, says conservative commentator and legal scholar Josh Hammer in his debut book Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.  Western civilization is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its enemies know well that to deny the existence of God and destroy individual rights, private property, and freedom, they must first destroy the Jews.  Ergo, he argues, the preservation of the West is contingent on the welfare of the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel.

It was the People of the Book who first introduced the world to monotheism, and along with it, to ethical and legal codes that became the basis for the establishment and preservation of all civilizations.  The West drew upon the Judaic idea of humankind as the pinnacle of God’s creation to give primacy to individuals, their freedom, and their rights.  Many of America’s Founding Fathers admired Jewish history, culture, and its legal and moral teachings.

God made a promise to the Jews to protect them as long as they kept his covenant and followed his commandments.  The Hebrew Bible speaks of the Divine Revelation of the Decalogue to Moses at Mount Sinai, the 613 mitzvot of the Torah, and the seven Noahide laws.  The seventh Noahide law, as mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud — to establish courts of justice — is perhaps the first expression of the need for neutral forums and judges to deliver justice.  It is by obeying these laws — divine and temporal – that Jews, often at great cost, have survived millennia of persecution.

JB Pritzker Wants to Lead the Trump Resistance. But Is He Turning His Back on DEI?By Gabe Kaminsky

https://www.thefp.com/p/jb-pritzker-dei-donald-trump-pritzker-family-foundation-website

Mentions of diversity and equity have vanished from the Pritzker Family Foundation’s website amid Trump’s attack on DEI.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Democratic Illinois governor JB Pritzker has emerged as a key figure in the Resistance 2.0. A longtime proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Pritzker has described Trump’s attack on DEI as an attempt to “tear down” civil rights. He also called Trump “unfit to lead” after the president suggested DEI played a role in a tragic aircraft collision in January in Washington, D.C.

But, according to a Free Press review of internet archive records, Pritzker’s own family nonprofit appears to have scrubbed a slew of DEI language from its website on March 11. The Pritzker Family Foundation eliminated the phrase justice and equity from its mission statement and jettisoned the word inequities to describe its focus on social justice. The group also removed the word equitable from the statement that said the group had a “deep desire to create more just and equitable outcomes.”

And the foundation removed an entire sentence from its website that read: “Learn more about our ongoing efforts to apply a lens of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) to our grantmaking here,” which linked to a downloadable foundation document detailing its “ongoing journey” to embrace DEI. This document can no longer be found on the foundation’s site, but was located by The Free Press on the internet archive.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, James Piereson Trump’s College Crackdown: It’s Their Own Fault Universities spent decades prioritizing activism over education.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-funding-anti-semitism-bias-universities

The federal government has some “legitimate concerns,” said Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong last week, after the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of $400 million in federal grants because, it claimed, Columbia had not addressed rampant anti-Semitism on its campus. Armstrong’s words suggest that Columbia received the message. But have other institutions of higher education?

A recent survey of university presidents suggests not. Unless they take steps to address not just anti-Semitism but also the profound ideological bias that has facilitated it and other forms of radicalism on campus, they may be in line for similar sanctions. If they fail to act, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The poll, conducted by Inside Higher Ed, reveals the extent to which higher ed is in denial about its predicament. It asked university presidents about the causes of declining public confidence in higher ed. Only 11 percent identified “ideological bias” as the biggest cause of public mistrust (though twice as many acknowledged it as a “valid concern”).

The vast majority are clearly misreading the public mood. A decade ago, 56 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education; by last year, that number had dropped to just 19 percent. A 2018 Pew poll found that 73 percent of Republicans believed higher education was headed in the wrong direction—and of that group, 79 percent cited politicization of the classroom and curriculum as a major reason. Among those voters, higher ed has been in free-fall for some time.