NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOGE Is Doing the Clean-Up Leftists Can’t Stand By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on May 7th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/doge_is_doing_the_clean_up_leftists_can_t_stand.html

In this allegorical scenario, Honey and Hank moved into a cozy home in a small community in New England 30 years ago.  The next day, their neighbor, Irene, brings over a hot, homemade casserole to welcome them to the neighborhood.

Within minutes, Honey and Irene “connect” in a phenomenon known as human chemistry.  They just seem to “get” each other.  And as their relationship evolves, they learn that they are on the same page on just about everything: raising kids, favorite foods, must-see TV programs, Mommy-and-Me classes, even the crocheting and knitting that their grandmothers taught them.  And each of them has three children, with two of them having the same name!

As luck would have it, their husbands also hit it off and have quite a lot in common, the biggest that both are on-the-road salesmen.

Over the years, the couples become so close that they vacation and celebrate birthdays and holidays together.  Honey and Irene even exchange house keys and list each other as emergency contacts on medical forms.

All good…for 30 years!

Uh-Oh…

Then, one day, Honey gets a phone call from her bank manager, Mr. Hervey, requesting that she and Hank come in for a sit-down.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hyperbole, Lies, and Delusions Pritzker’s New Hampshire speech blurred the line between hyperbole and hysteria, raising the question: is he channeling Seinfeld, Smollett—or something more sinister? By Richard Porter

Posted By on May 7th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/07/hyperbole-lies-and-delusions/

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s speech in New Hampshire last week was greeted by the media as yet another stirring call to arms for the rudderless Democratic Party.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption – but I am now,” Pritzker thundered. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.”

Republicans protested that the governor came close to inciting political violence – and they have a point, given the attempts to assassinate Donald Trump, the dangerous attacks on Tesla, and the near-kidnapping of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

However, what Pritzker had to say in his speech before channeling Maxine Waters’ infamous call to harass Republicans should not be overlooked. It raises an important question: Is Pritzker delusional, a liar, or merely hyperbolic?

Hyperbole, lies, and delusions are all forms of falsehoods, but of different magnitudes. The first are exaggerated claims not meant to be taken literally. Trump himself is no stranger to this oratorical device. Lies are exaggerations or falsehoods the speaker wants others to believe – and, while shameful, are a too-frequent feature of modern political discourses. Delusions are false beliefs at odds with observable reality.

Jerry Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” is an example of hyperbolic name calling. Seinfeld and his audience understood it was an exaggeration so grotesque that it was funny. No one thought the soup guy was actually a member of the SS. Jussie Smollett’s claim that MAGA bros assaulted him was a lie, albeit a calculated, elaborate, and harmful hoax. The Salem witch trials were the terrible consequence of a mass delusion.

So, is Pritzker channeling Seinfeld, Smollett, or Cotton Mather?

“It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law,” Pritzker said.

“Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history,” he said before adding, “Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo, tomorrow it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.”

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President Trump Is Right: Make VE Day, ‘Victory in Europe,’ May 8th, A National Holiday by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 7th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21597/ve-day-national-holiday

I was just a young boy when World War II ended, but I can still remember the enormous burst of elation in my Brooklyn neighborhood when it was announced on May 8, 1945 that Germany had surrendered. We knew that Imperial Japan was still a tough and dangerous adversary, but no one knew that three months and two atomic bombs later, the war would be brought to an immediate end.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of World War II, we are morally compelled to reflect on a seminal conflict that took over 70 million lives. We need to memorialize that enormous loss while appreciating that it reshaped the global order then, and continues to impact us today and far into the future.

President Donald J. Trump is correct in stating that the end of this conflict is so important it deserves to be observed by this nation every year.

His comments recognize the sad reality that the final frontline witnesses to this war are departing, transforming our relationship with this historical period from one of personal recollections to the documents written by historians. This irreparable loss requires us to safeguard those first-person stories and, equally important, to impart the war’s lessons to a new generation of Americans, many of whom remain sadly ignorant of even the most basic facts about World War II.

While the focus has traditionally been viewed through the experiences of Europeans and Americans, we need to appreciate that the war impacted people across Northern Africa, Asia and the Pacific. It created a United Nations organization that is still struggling to be relevant and effective as an honest peacekeeping force. Postwar, the United States assumed the role of economic global superpower, a trust it continues to this day.

As I remember the Brooklyn celebrations of Victory in Europe (VE Day), some might say, “Why continue to commemorate a conflict that should now be consigned to the bookshelf?” Because it reminds our nation of the sacrifices required to defend our freedoms and how missteps, errors of judgment, and national unpreparedness can lead to catastrophe.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Next Pope Needs to Preserve Judeo-Christian Civilization by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on May 7th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21590/the-next-pope

Some Catholics who are sensitive to the Holy See’s influence on international affairs may be hoping for a Pope who exercises decisive moral clarity in condemning brutal behavior, whether in Africa, China or elsewhere.

Pope Francis seemed to be infrequent in his condemnation of Islamist atrocities and when he did condemn them, he would be quick to criticize those who equated the religion of Islam with violence. Mass murders of Catholics and other Christians by Islamists take place daily in Nigeria, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

There are heroic candidates among the “Papabiles” (Papal possibles) such as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who offered himself in exchange for the hostages seized by the Gaza terrorist group Hamas.

Although the Vatican’s reason for being is to guide souls to God, its pronouncements on secular affairs not only have a profound impact, literally, on the lives of millions of Catholics, but on preserving the Judeo-Christian values upon which civilization is built, as well.

While the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics wait prayerfully for the elevation to the papacy of the 267th pope, successor to the Christ-appointed St. Peter, most of the rest of humanity may be wondering what impact the new pontiff could have on global affairs.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, which did not send a representative to the funeral of Pope Francis, has cause to be attentive. If this week’s Papal Conclave selects Philippines Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Archbishop of Manila, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping would have reason for concern.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Does The European Union Actually Expect Radical Islamists to Reform Themselves? by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21586/eu-palestinians-islamists

The European Union’s decision to grant the Palestinian Authority (PA) a sum of $2 billion to assist them to “reform themselves” can only be the result of wilful blindness, cognitive dissonance and what by now can only be ascribed to a proud European tradition of Jew-hate.

Israel’s warnings of the PA continuing to seize Israel’s land by phases — as planned by the PLO 10-Point Program of 1974 and advanced by former PA Prime Minister Salman Fayyad’s plan — to “create facts on the ground” with illegal buildings — are largely ignored by the West. So far, the PA, with the funding from the EU, has built more than 97,581 illegal structures on Israeli land that is still to be negotiated.

The Palestinian Authority also full-throatedly incites terrorism in its education system and bountifully funds terrorist acts. The total so far disbursed as remuneration for the PA’s “Pay-for-Slay” program and acts of terrorism reportedly exceeds $1 billion. This transaction has been in place for decades.

The EU’s naiveté (to be kind) is already bringing disaster upon many of its member nations by allowing unlimited Muslim migration, presumably in an unconditional desire for every vote imaginable.

Israelis are understandably against an untenable two-state solution — which they accurately see as no solution at all.

The European Union’s decision to grant the Palestinian Authority (PA) a sum of $2 billion to assist them to “reform themselves” can only be the result of wilful blindness, cognitive dissonance and what by now can only be ascribed to a proud European tradition of Jew-hate.

The PA, despite claiming to be secular, is saturated with an Islamist mentality in support of jihadists. The PA plays the West by displaying a veneer of reasonableness, victimhood and the bogus claim that it would, in an ever-extending future, accept some kind of peace with the Jews. This fiction is supposedly backed by an equally bogus claim that it would be willing — under conditions which would always be suicidal for the Jews to accept — to establish a two-state solution in Israel’s ancestral homeland.

This romantic fantasy persists in the face of the Palestinian Authority’s elaborate, extremely concrete programs with the European Union to appropriate land which, according to the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, must still be negotiated, as well as a continuing jobs program that the PA offers, similar to Murder, Inc. The PA’s “Pay for Slay” program lavishly rewards Palestinians who murder Israelis. The more Israelis they murder, the greater the sum. A 2024 report notes that the PA disburses more than $16 million each month to the Palestinian murderers and their families.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Hegseth’s Reforms Are What the Army Needs By Will Thibeau

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/hegseths-reforms-are-what-the-army-needs/

On May 1, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth executed what may be remembered as the most significant act of institutional reform in the American military since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. In a single memo, Hegseth initiated a reorganization of the Army that consolidates command structures, dismantles legacy programs, eliminates bureaucratic dead weight, and restores merit-based advancement. More importantly, it repudiates the reigning progressive orthodoxy that has turned the Pentagon into a symbol of regime decadence rather than national defense.

This reformation, co-led by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, reflects not only a strategic shift in military doctrine but a philosophical realignment away from managerial liberalism toward a more classical understanding of executive leadership. It is the kind of executive decisiveness that critics of the administrative state, from James Burnham to Angelo Codevilla, have long argued is necessary to break the inertia of our postmodern bureaucracies. This was not reform by committee. It was an assertion of will.

From Bureaucracy to Battlefield

The Army that Hegseth inherited was shaped by the long war on terror — an era of dispersed, low-intensity conflict that encouraged bureaucratic sprawl and doctrinal stagnation. In 2001, there were 871 generals and admirals serving throughout the Armed Forces. Today, there are roughly 950 — nearly a 10% growth, even though the total force has shrunk by roughly the same percentage over the same period. As War on the Rocks noted in a 2022 piece, this top-heavy structure created a glut of careerists more concerned with promotion boards than combat readiness.

The May 1 directive cuts approximately 40 general officer billets and up to 1,000 civilian staff roles at the Pentagon. In their place, Hegseth has emphasized agile command-and-control, streamlined formations, and the integration of unmanned systems. The retirement of legacy equipment like the Humvee and outdated rotary-wing platforms reflects a sober recognition that great power competition — not counterinsurgency — is now the defining strategic reality.

This modernization is long overdue. A 2021 RAND study found that the U.S. military’s acquisition system “incentivizes risk aversion and conformity,” resulting in a procurement timeline that often stretches over decades. The pivot toward off-the-shelf, commercially adaptable unmanned platforms represents not only a technological update, but a repudiation of the failed industrial-consultant complex that has long dominated defense acquisition.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Toward a Negotiated Settlement of the Trump-Harvard Showdown After freezing billions in funding, the Trump administration pushes Harvard to curb antisemitism and racial bias—sparking a legal showdown over free speech and federal overreach. By Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/06/toward-a-negotiated-settlement-of-the-trump-harvard-showdown/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Autism -– An Ignored Medical Crisis By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/autism_an_ignored_medical_crisis.html

The dramatic rise in autism prevalence over the past few decades is nothing short of alarming.

What exactly is autism? I ask this because when I was a child, it was so rare that none of us had ever heard of or known anyone with it.The Autism Speaks website defines autism thus:

Autism, or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. 

A few decades ago, autism was rare, but then it rose meteorically. “Reported rates of autism in the United States increased from < 3 per 10,000 children in the 1970s to > 30 per 10,000 children in the 1990s, a 10-fold increase.”

Since the 1990s, we have seen another tenfold increase. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects an estimated 1 in 31 children and 1 in 45 adults in the United States today.

In just two generations, the prevalence of autism has risen 100-fold. Was there a similar explosion for any other medical or public health condition?

Can this 1,000 percent increase be explained by genetics, as some doctors suggest? 

A 100-fold increase in two generations—roughly 40 years—defies the principles of genetic evolution, which operates on timescales spanning centuries, not decades. This unprecedented rise points to environmental factors, including food additives, medicines, vaccines, and other toxins, as the primary drivers of the autism epidemic.

Genetics likely plays some role in autism. Twin studies suggest that autism’s heritability ranges from 60% to 90%, indicating a strong genetic component.

However, genetic changes do not occur quickly enough to explain a 100-fold increase in prevalence within two generations, only two reproductive cycles.

Evolution through genetic mutation and natural selection is a gradual process that often requires thousands of years to produce significant changes at the population level.

No one would attribute the increase in obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases over the past few decades to genetics instead of environmental factors like diet and exercise. Autism is exhibiting a similar trend.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The West Eats Itself By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/the_west_eats_itself.html

Western governments undermine elections, religious freedom, free markets, and free speech.

The same Western leaders who speak endlessly about “protecting Democracy” continue to rig elections, outlaw political parties, and prosecute candidates.  Germany has declared Alternative for Germany — now the country’s most popular party — an “extremist group” on par with domestic terror organizations.  The European Union helped Marxist globalists in Romania invalidate a presidential election and ban the winner from office.  France and Brazil have followed the U.S. example of bringing ludicrous criminal charges against popular anti-Establishment politicians, and while President Trump overcame the sham prosecutions targeting him, Marine Le Pen and Jair Bolsonaro are fighting just to survive. 

Let’s not forget either that the Ukraine-Russia War drags on today only because U.S. and European forces helped overthrow the legitimately elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, back in 2014.  His transgression?  Yanukovych’s government was pushing back against the EU’s efforts to absorb Ukraine into its continental empire.  The same NATO and EU talking-heads who denounce Russia’s conquest of its neighbor are mostly mad because they hoped to conquer Ukraine first.

It’s a disorienting time for Westerners who once respected their civic institutions.  The Cold War mentality of the twentieth century created clear distinctions between closed, communist systems and rights-based, free societies.  In the West, people could freely practice the religious tenets of their respective faiths; in communist societies, people were expected to obey the quasi-divine strictures of the State.  In the West, people could own property and freely exchange goods and services; in communist societies, people owned nothing and received only what the State gave them.  In the West, people could speak their minds and publicly debate new ideas; in communist societies, people adhered to politically correct ideology under the constant threat of arrest, torture, and even death.  The West was supposed to err on the side of individual freedoms, even when those freedoms permitted awful people to say awful things. 

Western societies did not always live up to the principles that distinguished them from totalitarian regimes, but respect for personal freedom did serve as an effective guardrail that kept Western governments from careening toward totalitarianism, too.  

What’s going on today is entirely different.  

ELECTIONS, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The delicious media meltdown over Reform’s success The media elites’ hissy fit over the local-election results is a hilarious rage of the entitled. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 6th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/05/the-delicious-media-meltdown-over-reforms-success/

The BBC’s mask didn’t so much slip on Friday as completely disintegrate. When Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservative Party, was elected the Reform UK mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, the Beeb put out one of the weirdest and most telling tweets of recent times. Jenkyns’s victory marks ‘a return to politics for the former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’, it said. Greggs worker? Heaven forfend! You could almost hear the sloshing of spilt macchiatos as the Oxbridge tits of the BBC’s social-media team clocked that someone who once served sausage rolls to the hard-up was now a mayor.

It was undiluted class snobbery. It was a sly jeer designed to get the Beeb’s more middle-class readership chortling with gleeful derision at the thought of such riff-raff-coded people now running the country. I was just a ‘Saturday kid’ at Greggs, when ‘I was 16’, protested Jenkyns. Others pointed out that she’s since been a Conservative MP and even a minister in both Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. Doesn’t matter, guys. Thirty-five years ago she heated up Cornish pasties for hungry working-class people and in the eyes of the BBC that makes her a strange and possibly unsuitable person for high politics.

The Beeb deleted the tweet. Maybe someone’s knuckles were rapped. But we could all see what was happening here. For the benefit of non-British readers, Greggs is a bakery that serves piping-hot pastries and sweet treats. It is especially popular on high streets in ‘left behind’ towns. And it has become shorthand among the chattering classes who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘oik’ anymore. Make no mistake – when the Beeb said ‘former Greggs worker’, rather than ‘former minister’, it was implying that Jenkyns has rubbed shoulders with wrong’uns; with the little folk who not only voted for Brexit but, worse, also prefer a Greggs chicken bake to a salmon and spinach brioche roll from Benugo.