RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21576/china-trade-war

Xi Jinping’s regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington.

[O]n April 24 about a dozen Chinese officials, including a “high-ranking official from the Chinese Ministry of Finance,” were seen entering the U.S. Treasury’s main building in Washington at 7:00 in the morning as Chinese security officials attempted to prevent photographers from recording the entry.

“In fact, the tariff waivers underscore that not only does Beijing need access to the American market far more than Americans need the China market but also that the United States makes vital products that simply aren’t Made in China, and won’t be for years at best.” — Alan Tonelson, trade expert at RealityChek, to Gatestone, April 25, 2025.

When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without.

Beijing has ordered its airlines not to take delivery of Boeing aircraft, and the plane maker has now flown back, from China to the U.S., three 737 Max aircraft that were about to be delivered. Due to the long order backlogs at both Boeing and Airbus, this punishment imposes, as a practical matter, almost no cost on Boeing. Yet if Trump were to order Boeing not to deliver parts or provide services to Chinese airlines, China would soon have to ground a large number of its airliners.

China is making significant trade concessions without saying it is making concessions. Xi Jinping’s regime simply cannot admit it is not able to stand up to Washington. When Trump has to raise the temperature, Beijing has just shown him which U.S. products China believes it cannot do without

China, according to Reuters and Financial Times reporting on April 25, is not uniformly imposing its new 125% across-the-board tariff on American goods. In short, certain imports from the U.S. are in fact coming in tariff-free. Beijing’s new policy has not been announced and is not official.

“Companies in sectors including aviation and industrial chemicals said that some of their products had already been granted a reprieve, while local media reported that some semiconductors had been spared tariffs,” the Financial Times noted.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/26/klaus-schwab-the-last-davos-man/

On Easter Monday, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab resigned as chair of its board of trustees. He stepped down amid swirling internal allegations that he misused funds and manipulated the WEF’s research to curry favour with governments. We don’t yet know if these charges are true, but manipulation certainly goes with the territory of the WEF. Indeed, manipulating the media and political culture to embrace the outlook of the global elites has always been one of its central aims.

To understand the significance of Schwab’s departure, we need to understand the role he played in the mythology of globalism. Arguably more than any other individual, Schwab personified the quasi-religion of globalism. If he was the pope of the church of globalism, his cardinals were members of the WEF’s board of trustees, including European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink and former US vice-president Al Gore. These are the Davos Men and Women – members of the super-rich Western oligarchy and their celebrity hangers-on who gather every year at the WEF conference in the Swiss mountain town of Davos.

One of the defining features of Davos Man is that he subscribes to a globalist fantasy, which assumes the nation state is a toothless anachronism. Rather, it is international institutions (like the WEF) that are supposedly best suited to running the world. He blithely assumes that there are no national solutions to the challenges facing the world, only global ones.

In recent years, however, Davos Man has lost his footing. Although the WEF’s public-relations machine continued to churn out high-profile propaganda, behind the scenes it was evident that globalism was gradually unravelling. The WEF never truly got over the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, and was further hit by the eruption of geopolitical conflict – namely, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both events led towards more economic protectionism throughout the world.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21574/iran-nuclear-trap

Talks offer hope of sanctions relief, currency stabilization, and international legitimacy — all while buying time to continue uranium enrichment behind closed doors. The West calls it a “deal.” Iran calls it a jackpot.

Just imagine the conversations happening behind closed doors in Tehran. Iranian officials are likely saying something like: “…At least we can waste another two or three years pretending to negotiate. We can agree to pause enrichment a little bit, just enough to give them a diplomatic victory…. Trump is so eager to get a discredited Nobel Peace Prize, but the Norwegians will never give it to him — to them, the ‘left’ is a religion. Their heroes are Castro and Arafat. Meanwhile, to show Norway how peaceful he is, Trump will let Iran, Russia and China off the hook. Poor fellow, it will not work. He will just find himself the ‘sucker’ and the ‘loser.’ Meanwhile he will have thrown away what could have made him a historic great. While he is are celebrating his ‘peacefulness’ in keeping America out of a war that was not going to happen anyway, we can keep on moving toward our bomb, our missiles and the miniature nuclear warheads to put on them. Quietly. And if we get caught? So what. The Americans will negotiate again!”

The idea that you can contain or “monitor” Iran with inspections and enrichment caps is a lovely, romantic fantasy. Sadly, this regime cannot be trusted. It cannot be allowed to keep any part of a nuclear infrastructure. The only acceptable path is total dismantlement or permanent destruction. No centrifuges, no uranium enrichment, no stockpiles, no underground facilities. Nothing.

Each round of diplomacy gives the regime more room to maneuver, more time to develop its weapons, and more resources to fund terror proxies across the Middle East and Latin America. The result is not peace — it is proliferation.

Unless the West finally gets serious, Iran will cross the nuclear weapons threshold and the world will not only face an extremist, predatory regime armed with nuclear weapons, but the mother of all arms races.

Unfortunately, the only solution left is to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. No talks. No deals. No illusions. It is time to bring these endless negotiations to an end.

The Iranian regime is once again celebrating having diplomatic negotiations with the United States, this time under the Trump administration. Tehran’s leaders have been framing these renewed talks as a positive that will enable them to retain their hold on power, and their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs to unleash at a later date.

Iranian officials, including leading figures in the foreign ministry, have voiced optimism about the direction of diplomacy, portraying the Trump team’s willingness to engage as a step toward “mutual understanding.” They would like the world to believe that diplomacy is working — when in reality, it is a trap. The excitement in Tehran is not a signal of peace or cooperation; it is a victory celebration. Whenever a terrorist regime that chants “Death to America” starts smiling about negotiations, it is not diplomacy — it is a win.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/reality-upside-down-in-the-netherlands/

It doesn’t just happen in Britain.

In the southeastern Dutch province of North Brabant, halfway between the cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen, lies a town called Uden, which has a population of approximately 38,000 and is a part of the municipality of Maashorst. On the morning of April 18, Maashorst’s municipal council held a meeting at which it was addressed by a resident of Uden named Seb van Lier.

Let it be said that van Lier cuts an imposing figure. He brings to mind John Fetterman, the massive, broad-shouldered, bald-headed senator from Pennsylvania. Van Lier, unlike Fetterman, has a shaggy salt-and-pepper beard; and he arrived at this public meeting dressed, like Fetterman, in a dark hoodie. As you can see in the video of his remarks, which the valiant Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek posted on X, van Lier began by telling the council that on January 10, one of his five daughters, aged 15, was “brutally raped” by a Syrian asylum seeker, and that ever since that day she’s experienced severe physical and psychological suffering.

Van Lier looks like a hell of a tough dude, but after spelling out these basic facts, he choked up. One of the council members asked him if he wanted a glass of water. He said no. After a pause he resumed speaking. In his view, he said, the mayor and the council were partially responsible for his daughter’s suffering. Why? Because “we feel that the rapist was portrayed as the victim and we, the family, as the perpetrator.” Because the council had been “playing down the seriousness of the case” and trying to “cover it up.” Because the therapist who’d been appointed by the council to treat van Lier’s daughter had advised him, van Lier, not to tell the council his daughter’s story. Because in statements to the media, the mayor of Maashorst, Hans van de Pas, had suggested that he didn’t believe the 15-year-old’s account of her rape. Because the mayor and council had seen fit to publicly emphasize that the alleged perpetrator lived not in Maashorst but in the nearby town of Veghel (so what?) and that he was a minor (even though there was no reliable way of establishing his age).

Van Lier had additional grievances. He’d been depicted in the media not as a legitimately troubled father but as a “rioter.” He’d been arrested by the police “with great violence.” Most egregious of all, the perpetrator had not been arrested. As of April 18, he was still walking free.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21573/china-helping-houthis-attack-us

China’s regime, despite repeated warnings from Washington, is helping the Yemen-based militia try to kill American sailors.

“Providing satellite data that is being used to identify U.S. and other ships in the Red Sea for missile strikes appears to be part of a deal between Beijing and the Houthis that would end attacks on Chinese shipping.” — Bill Gertz, Washington Times, April 18, 2025.

President Donald Trump should invoke the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917 and end trade and investment ties with China. China’s regime, by its actions and its words, is America’s enemy.

“We have to stop China before they sink an American ship.” — Blaine Holt, retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone, April 2025.

“We can confirm the reporting that Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. (CGSTL) is directly supporting Iran-backed Houthi terrorist attacks on U.S. interests,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said on April 17th at her regular press briefing

Specifically, CGSTL has been providing targeting data and probably raw satellite imagery to the Houthis for their attacks on U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea.

China did not issue a clear official denial of the State Department charge.

By now, one thing is clear: China’s regime, despite repeated warnings from Washington, is helping the Yemen-based militia try to kill American sailors.

The Trump administration should designate the Chinese regime as an enemy and impose costs accordingly.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/uk-labours-lost-loves/

On a quiet parliamentary afternoon, just before the House of Commons adjourned for the Easter Recess, Sir Keir Starmer’s  own government launched a destructive missile, not an unguided one either but one aimed squarely at the Labour Party, in the hope that MPs would be so keen to leave for the holidays that they wouldn’t notice or mind very much.

Governments do that kind of thing from time to time, and sometimes it works by pushing an embarrassing controversy into a future when public opinion has “moved on,” i.e., is distracted by a later and more outrageous ministerial decision. But the maneuver collapses when the topic is a truly incendiary one.

On this occasion the topic was the scandal of Muslim grooming-and-rape gangs and their mainly white working-class young English women victims, some of whom were children (and not only legally so.) That scandal is now entering its third decade—first rumors of it were heard in 2001 and it broke into national news with the Rotherham episode in 2013—as it simultaneously morphs into an even more serious scandal of official and police complicity in both the original rape scandals and the subsequent cover-up.

It’s not the case that nothing has been done in the intervening twelve years. More than fifty major cities across Britain have had grooming gang scandals, trials, and convictions which resulted in lengthy sentences for perpetrators since the Rotherham scandal went national in 2013. There have been ten official enquiries, from which a general picture emerges of organized gangs of “South Asian” or “Pakistani-heritage” Muslim men who prey on vulnerable teenage English girls, seduce them, beat and brutalize them, demoralize them as worthless sluts, and then prostitute them to friends and clients in other towns.

The mass media has also reported these stories, run commentaries on them, and interviewed some of the surviving victims. But they have done so at intervals in response to the latest city “shamed” rather than in a sustained and detailed way that would compel government action to discover what was happening and to set it right once and for all. Similarly, the enquiries, though serious and informative, have been limited in their impact because they have had neither the powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath nor terms of reference covering police and official complicity that would force the worst aspects of the scandal into the sunlight of public and political debate.

Accordingly, the scandals have rumbled on in the background of politics with some of its key facts hard to establish. “Grooming” of the kind described above doesn’t exist as a specific criminal offense and “rape” covers a larger category of offenses. Statistics about the numbers of such rapists and their victims are scattered—the Office of National Statistics doesn’t keep them and tells inquirers to write to the Home Office. Over the years both official inquiries and police investigations have refused to divulge some of their findings “in order to protect community relations” which is sometimes a sanitized explanation of the fear of being accused of racism. And there are underlying disagreements in Westminster, Whitehall, and the media over whether Muslims are disproportionately represented in such crimes and if so, whether their religion has anything to do with it, and if so, whether such a connection should be discussed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21571/trump-china

This global catastrophe [China having lied about the human-to-human transmissibility of COVID-19] was followed by China’s sending the poison fentanyl – and, after 2019, “just” its precursor ingredients — to the US, along with other lethal opioids. The smallest amount of fentanyl, equivalent to “a few grains of salt,” can cause death. During the last five years, more than 250,000 Americans have been killed by fentanyl overdoses.

The pattern is familiar: a Western company invests years in research and development, launches an innovative product, and a short while later an almost identical copy turns up, from China, at a much lower price. No development costs, no middlemen, just direct access to the same market, with subsidized pricing to put the original company out of business. How can the inventor ever win like that?

If we continue to allow ourselves to be drained by a regime that never plays by the rules, the United States will end up where Europe already finds itself: with massive deindustrialization, strategic dependency and weakness in times of crisis. Trump appears, at least for now, committed to turning that future around.

So let us criticize the orange man: his methods, his sometimes untoward comments, his impulsive shifts. But let us not lose sight that when it comes to the bottom line, in reining in a lawless predatory Chinese market and reindustrializing America, he is right. No one else even tried.

In the tariff war launched by US President Donald Trump against China, much is said about the Americans’ strategy, mistakes and “brutality”. Less is said about China. Here are three truths about China’s relationship with the West that help to better nuance a simplistic thinking that many so readily embrace.

1. China’s homicides have poisoned the world

During the COVID -19; crisis, vaccines heated up tempers to such an extent that many people lost sight of the fact that vaccines were merely an answer to the original problem: the virus. Whether it escaped from a laboratory or came from a “wet market”, COVID is in all instances a legacy of the Chinese communist regime to the world.

Since then, China has been cracking down on any attempt to identify the source of the virus, just as, for years, it has been doing its utmost to cover up the situation. The original error seems to have been negligence, however that was quickly followed by deliberate lies as to the human-to-human transmissibility of the virus. While China shut down its own internal systems of transportation, it intentionally, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO), saw millions of its citizens travel to locations abroad. Those who restricted admitting them were accused of “racism.”