NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From Profanity-Chic to Terrorist-Porn Democrats, reeling from electoral losses, embrace profanity-laced rhetoric, street-theater activism, and veiled support for political violence, alienating voters and hastening their own decline. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/27/from-profanity-chic-to-terrorist-porn/

The Democratic Party is polling about 27 percent approval—and sinking.

In 2024, it lost the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and both the popular vote and the Electoral College, 312-226.

In 2024, Trump won over 46 percent of the Hispanic vote, including a majority of Hispanic men. Trump also likely captured 26 percent of the black male vote, doubling his 2020 total.

In 2024, Trump increased his 2020 vote total in every single state. And he won 89 percent of all the counties in the United States.

On every issue, Democrats sided with strident leftist movements rather than the majority of Americans.

They supported globalism over nationalism, high-priced green energy over lower gas and electricity prices, and an open border and 12 million unaudited illegal aliens over security and legal-only immigration.

They seem unconcerned with our $36 trillion debt or the deterrence lost abroad that led to two theater-wide existential wars.

Democrats stay mum about unfair trade and budget deficits. They prefer the Black Lives Matter fixation on the color of our skin rather than Martin Luther King’s emphasis on the content of our character.

They support allowing biological men to overpower women in female sports events—in opposition to 80 percent of the electorate.

Democrats faced choices after their catastrophic defeat last year.

One, they could have stopped the hemorrhaging of their base of 18-30-year-olds, black men, Hispanics, and Independents by moving toward the center.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Adam Zivo There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/drugs-harm-reduction-safer-supply-opioids-denver-sweden-uk-canada
Adam Zivo is director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy.

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Nurses in Iran Face Poverty Dwindling numbers under barbaric tyranny. by Struan Stevenson

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nurses-in-iran-face-poverty/

Women in Iran have been treated as second-class citizens by the mullahs for almost five decades. Women’s dress codes are under constant scrutiny. They must wear the hijab, and ‘morality police’ are on relentless patrol to enforce the law. The death in custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022 for not wearing her hijab properly ignited a nationwide uprising and a brutal crackdown by the mullahs that led to more than 750 deaths and tens of thousands of arrests. Women, particularly young women like Mahsa Amini, are singled out for brutal attacks for the ‘crime’ of malveiling. Girls who were deemed to be improperly dressed in the street have suffered horrific acid attacks and stabbings, in assaults openly condoned by the mullahs. Teenage girls arrested for the offense of posting videos of themselves dancing or singing on social media have been publicly flogged. Young female students attending end-of-term parties have been fined and beaten. This is what gender equality looks like in Iran today. But courageous women have led the protests, chanting “Women, resistance, freedom.” They have been on the front line of demonstrations calling for overthrowing the theocratic regime.

Against this background of unrelenting misogyny and discrimination, the exploitation of Iranian nurses, a respected and hardworking sector of society, continues unabated. As the Iranian economy collapses under a tsunami of political incompetence, corruption, warmongering, and international sanctions, the rial has halved in value since Masoud Pezeshkian, the so-called ‘moderate’ president, took office in August last year.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Groves of Academe Get Some Needed Weeding Clearing the noxious ideological weeds that are choking our youth. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-groves-of-academe-get-some-needed-weeding/

After fifty years of pedagogical malpractice and trillions of squandered taxpayer dollars, Donald Trump has begun to rid our public schools of their destructive politicization. He’s directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, and has commenced “pausing” funds given to rich, prestigious universities that promote transgender voodoo, tolerate anti-Semitism, and enable supporters of terrorism.

Most important, he’s acting to reverse the failures of our public schools to teach foundational skills and knowledge necessary for citizens living in a free state with unalienable rights and political equality.

And he’s starting with the exorbitant public funding of private universities flush with huge, tax-free endowments, and taxpayer subsidies distributed through government-backed student loans managed by the Department of Education–– “a student-loan boondoggle,” the Wall Street Journal writes, “with a $1.6 trillion portfolio, while harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

Moreover, universities with bulging endowments have been raising tuition costs far beyond the rate of inflation, at the same time they create politicized programs, even as completion and graduation rates decline, administrator outnumber tenured faculty, GPA inflation skyrockets, and fundamental skills and knowledge are replaced with leftist ideological fads like illiberal identity politics programs.

Trump’s cutting back on federal funds is a good way to fight back against this degradation of curricula. Taking back $400 million from Columbia is a good start. Its indulgence of violent protests against Israel, replete with anti-Semitic, genocidal slogans, swastika graffiti targeting Israel, and violence against Jewish students, epitomize the ideological corruption of our once-most prestigious universities.

But Trump also is offering a smart way to get the funds back: by requiring universities to agree to meet his nine demands, including “banning masks, empowering campus police and putting the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under ‘academic receivership,’” the Journal writes, which means such programs would no longer be controlled by the faculty. After some grousing, Columbia has acceded to Trump’s conditions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOGE in the 1830s The war against big government has been going on for a long time. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/doge-in-the-1830s/

The war against big government has been going on much longer than President Trump has been in office. One of the first arenas in which it played out was the struggle over the Bank of the United States. Such a bank, a private corporation, had been established during the

Washington administration in 1791, but its charter expired in 1811 when a vote to renew it was narrowly defeated: the Senate vote was a tie, and President James Madison’s vice president, George Clinton, voted against the bank. Nevertheless, the idea of a central bank for federal funds did not die.

The Bank’s advocates contended that it was necessary to put the nation’s finances in order; its foes, including Madison, argued that it was an unconstitutional power grab on the part of the federal government. It was also dangerous, then as now, to turn power over the public funds to an oligarchy of private financiers; the possibility for corruption, and for a de facto second government developed by buying favors until large enough to challenge the government of the United States, was immense. Nonetheless, it was the Bank’s great foe, Madison, whose signature brought the Bank of the United States back to life in 1816.

Opposition to the Bank was one of the issues that later propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1829. President Jackson called the Bank of the United States a “monster,” and denounced its “power and corruption.” He charged it with interfering in the political process and bribing elected officials and journalists with “loans” so that they would do its bidding. There was ample evidence for this. The New York Courier and Enquirer, which up until the 1832 election had opposed the Bank, received a substantial loan from it and suddenly became a vocal supporter of rechartering the Bank.

The pro-Jackson Washington Globe accused pro-Bank senators George Poindexter of Mississippi and Josiah Johnston of Louisiana of accepting enormous bribes in return for their support of the Bank, and indeed, Poindexter had received from the Bank a $10,000 loan ($300,000 today) and Johnston one of $36,000 (over $1 million today). These were by no means the only loans the Bank gave to politicians.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorist talking points and the Israeli protest movement Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/terrorist-talking-points-and-the-israeli-protest-movement/

There’s nothing new about the terrorist ghouls in Gaza plagiarizing the Israeli protest movement’s mantras. Slogans from the “Kaplan crowd” are the source of hostage-video scripts, practically verbatim.

That this doesn’t put a dent in the messages conveyed at anti-government demonstrations—a biggie being the threat posed to the country by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is not only shameful. It’s counter-productive where securing the freedom of the captives is concerned.

As recently released hostage Omer Shem Tov recounted on Tuesday to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, “The times we were shown television in captivity, [our captors pointed to] the division among the [Israeli] people. … They speak about how Israel will be destroyed from within, and that’s what gives them strength.”

By now it’s widely acknowledged that though the Oct. 7 massacre had been planned well in advance, Hamas took advantage of the apparent “civil war” in Israel—over the government’s intention to reform the judicial system—to strike when it did. Terrorists who participated in the atrocities said as much to their Israeli interrogators.

Not that this awareness has caused the protest movement to lower the temperature. On the contrary, it has expanded the focus of its hysteria and operations.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump foreign-policy team’s real problem The Yemen attack leak was a bad mistake. But a clueless Steve Witkoff’s embrace of Qatar and rationalization of Hamas betray the president’s realist agenda. Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-trump-foreign-policy-teams-real-problem/?utm_campaign=

It was the gaffe that critics of the Trump administration have been praying for. However it happened, the inclusion of Atlantic  editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a group chat on the Signal App among the administration’s leading defense policymakers about an impending attack on the Houthis in Yemen, was a gob-smacking blunder of epic proportions.

It not only embarrassed participants in the conversion, like Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. It called into question the competence of President Donald Trump’s national-security team and the process by which it communicates and shares information at the highest level.

If, as appears to be the case, it was Waltz’s office that  was responsible for connecting Goldberg to the chat, it’s something he’ll never entirely live down, even if Trump is prepared to forgive him.

But as much as Goldberg’s unwitting scoop deserved the headlines and the endless discussions it generated, it was actually not the most troubling news event of the week for Trump’s national-security team.

The worst administration blunder didn’t involve the group chat about Yemen or any other issue that the president’s critics are obsessed with. Instead, it was the comments of Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, on “The Tucker Carlson Show” podcast. The interview made clear that the person Trump has tasked with conducting negotiations about the war in Gaza and the release of the hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, is utterly clueless about malign actors like Qatar, Iran and its terrorist proxies.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yes, Let’s Give An America ‘Without A Meaningful Government’ A Try

Posted By on March 27th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/27/yes-lets-give-an-america-without-a-meaningful-government-a-try/

Quite a few in this country are madly in love with government. They cannot conceive of life in which we are free agents, liberated from the chains of reckless lawmaking, imperious regulating and stifling bureaucracy. It’s a distorted world view.

And it’s one held by a couple of university academics, who claim “the U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself,” with the Trump administration setting out “to create an America its people have never experienced – one without a meaningful government.”

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati, who last year wrote the book “How Government Built America,” summarize their thoughts in The Conversation. They write like apologists for statism, a nasty ideology that relies on coercion and interventionism and is the factory setting for those who wish to rule rather than govern within constitutional limits. It’s founded on the belief that says “government knows better than you, in regards to important matters,” and is poisonous to civil society.

The pair complain that President Donald Trump’s “aim to eliminate government could result in” a country “in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.” Do they have any idea how far off they are?

FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The Houthi group-chat leak reveals some truly unserious people The Trump administration has too many chuckleheads and too few people of substance. Tim Black

Posted By on March 26th, 2025

It is a security cock-up of monumental proportions.

We now know that a dozen senior Trump administration officials, including national-security adviser Michael Waltz, vice-president JD Vance and defence secretary Pete Hegseth, were using Signal, a commercial messaging service, to discuss the plan to launch airstrikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels earlier this month. This in itself ought to set alarm bells ringing. To talk about highly sensitive, top-secret military plans, officials are required to use approved government equipment in a compartmented information facility, not a slightly flashier form of WhatsApp. For obvious reasons.

The reason we know about any of this is even more worrying. Earlier this month, Waltz – the guy charged with maintaining national security, no less – accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Trump-hating Atlantic, into this ‘Houthi PC small group’. It beggars belief. Waltz effectively gave a journalist diametrically opposed to the current administration a full view of the Trump White House’s military planning. Goldberg saw all the operational details of the then forthcoming strikes on Yemen. He saw which weapons were to be deployed, the identity of the targets and the sequencing of the attacks. He saw information that could have easily been used to harm US military and intelligence personnel in the Middle East. That it wasn’t is solely down to the fact that Goldberg has been careful about when and how he revealed what had happened, taking special care to withhold and redact key details.

So incredible was this security lapse that Goldberg didn’t believe it at first. He thought he was being entrapped. It was only when the US actually carried out the airstrikes on the Houthis on the day and time that had been discussed in the group that Goldberg finally accepted it was real. Waltz had genuinely given him a front-row seat into the innermost sanctum of the Trump administration. ‘Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot’, a source told Politico on Tuesday. They’re not wrong.

Of course this is not the first time US officials have used their own private emails or messaging apps to talk policy and share plans. As Goldberg himself notes, national-security officials do communicate on messaging apps like Signal, although they usually confine their chats to routine work matters, rather than top-secret plans to bomb militias in the Middle East.

It’s also a little rich watching Democrats and their media cheerleaders gorging themselves on this security fiasco. They really shouldn’t be chucking rocks, given the dilapidated state of their own glass house. In 2016, it emerged that state department official Jake Sullivan, later the national security adviser to Joe Biden, had been sending messages to Hillary Clinton’s infamous private email account, brimful with highly classified information.

Still, the lack of seriousness on show here is something to behold. These people occupy the most senior offices of state in America. Yet here they were chatting away about launching lethal airstrikes in Yemen on a messaging app, as if they were arranging a night out.

Vice-president Vance complained about ‘bailing Europe out again’, on the grounds that the Red Sea shipping route menaced by the Houthis is used more by European freight than American. To be fair, this is nothing Vance wouldn’t say to European leaders’ faces. But it does capture something of the incoherence of American First foreign policy – a nation at once determined to bend the world to its interests, while being reluctant to protect a shipping lane used by US tankers. The response of defence secretary Hegseth is even more telling for its caps-locked shrillness: ‘I share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.’

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Exporting the Columbia Prototype The Trump administration should leverage its successful approach to the troubled Ivy League university to fight anti-Semitism and racialism elsewhere.

Posted By on March 26th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/exporting-the-columbia-prototype

Last week, the Trump administration won a high-stakes showdown with Columbia University. Following the October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, Columbia has been ground zero for pro-Hamas agitation on America’s campuses. It has seen marches, occupations, vandalism, and violence. In response, the White House threatened to withhold $400 million in public funding unless the university enacted meaningful reforms.

The administration’s hardball approach paid off: Columbia has now acceded to virtually all the administration’s demands. The university has banned masked protests, boosted campus security, and established administrative oversight over its radical “post-colonial” academic departments, which have been hotbeds of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism. The relationship between the White House and American universities now enters a new phase, and the Columbia episode could serve as a prototype for the administration’s approach going forward.

The administration should understand that anti-Semitism is just part of the Left’s ideological nesting doll. For campus activists, the Jews are the Middle East’s oppressors, while the Palestinians are the oppressed and are therefore justified in violent revolution. The narrative is attractive because it can be scaled symbolically: in the progressive imagination, Israel is to the Palestinians as white America is to black America and as Western society is to the Third World. Anti-Semitism is a stand-in for anti-whiteness and, ultimately, for anti-Western ideologies.