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March 2025

China Is Taking War to Earth Orbits: A ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ Is on the Way by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21510/china-space-pearl-harbor

“Communist China has now taken war to the heavens, to low earth orbit, and very likely, will take war to the moon, Mars, and beyond. The heavens are no longer safe for the democracies.” — Richard Fisher, International Assessment and Strategy Center, to Gatestone, March 2025.

“Rising powers, notably China and Russia, saw how reliant we were on space—and how poorly defended our systems were. Our access to the strategic high ground is now more threatened than ever before.” — Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, to Gatestone, March 2025

China is making fast progress in building space weapons. “The Chinese ISR”—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—”capabilities are become very capable,” said Gen. Guetlein. “They have gone from what we used to call a ‘Kill Chain’ to a ‘Kill Mesh.'” A Kill Mesh combines ISR satellites with an array of weapons systems.

“The recent demonstration of Chinese ‘dogfighting’ capabilities in space is an indicator that Beijing means to use force on earth. By targeting sensitive U.S. military satellites, the People’s Liberation Army can render us deaf, dumb, and blind, long before it strikes.” — Brandon Weichert, to Gatestone, March 2025.

The Chinese are evidently planning to blind not only America’s military but also America’s civilian society, which is heavily dependent on space assets. Almost nothing modern in America will work when the Chinese are finished attacking in the heavens.

“With our commercial assets, we have observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchronicity and in control,” the U.S. Space Force’s Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein told the 16th annual McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia on March 18. “That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another.”

Guetlein’s stark comment about China signals a break with the past. “This marks the end of the Western-American-liberal dream of nations leaving wars on Earth so they can cooperate in space to advance humanity,” Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told Gatestone after the general’s widely publicized remarks. “Communist China has now taken war to the heavens, to low earth orbit, and very likely, will take war to the moon, Mars, and beyond. The heavens are no longer safe for the democracies.”

Urgently Needed: A Trump ‘Manhattan Project’ for Nuclear Fusion Energy to Solve AI’s Approaching Electricity Crisis by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21509/urgently-needed-a-trump-manhattan-project-for

Eighty years ago this summer, the United States would assure its role as a global superpower for generations to come by harnessing its scientific, industrial and military resources under the code name, “The Manhattan Project,” creating a war-winning weapon, the atomic bomb. President Donald Trump now has the means to repeat history by funding a 2025 version of the Manhattan Project that guarantees our access to all the energy we will need to power this century.

To place the challenge in context, the president is no fan of wind turbines. Grounded in the economics of business, he appreciates that the energy rate of return for the enormous investment required to build wind turbines makes little sense. He remains focused on some of America’s greatest energy resources, domestic fossil fuels, making us not only capable of running our economy but independent of foreign crude and those control that spigot.

And yet, there is an energy shortage on our nation’s horizon.

It’s electricity. The necessary power required to run not just artificial intelligence (AI) computers but also propulsion, transportation, military needs, heating, cooling refrigeration, lighting and so on, comes from electrical generating stations — and they are going to be hard-pressed to supply what is needed if the United States is to maintain a lead in this crucial sector. Given that AI is projected to have an impact on everything from future medical breakthroughs to battlefield victories, it is a leadership we dare not give away. However, without American generated electricity – and a lot of it is – the next generation of AI success will belong to a foreign power.

It is best to appreciate the challenge. AI data centers are projected to consume approximately two to three percent of U.S. electrical consumption this year alone, with expectations of continued growth now a given. Future projections can see AI requiring as much as 12% of America’s electrical production.

Several tech companies have already announced plans for AI data centers that would each require hundreds of megawatts of power. These kinds of demands have compelled Microsoft and Constellation Energy to craft plans to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Others are proposing to build new nuclear facilities from scratch to power required AI centers.

Ignore the bluster – Donald Trump is not an imperialist MAGA foreign policy is driven by a haunting sense of America’s vulnerability and decline. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/28/ignore-the-bluster-donald-trump-is-not-an-imperialist/

US president Donald Trump’s MAGA brand of foreign policy has been treated with contempt and consternation by much of the world. He has incited the ire of neoliberal theorists like Francis Fukuyama, as well as many European intellectuals, who rarely have much positive to say about America anyway. To them, Trump epitomises a destructive American arrogance and imperial delusions.

Whatever he may think of himself, Donald Trump is no Augustan figure, no colossus ready to conquer the known world. He is a phenomenon borne of concern about American decline, ranging from failing education levels and massive debt to frayed national coherence and fading industrial, even military, supremacy. He is driven not by imperial ambitions (despite his absurd claims about acquiring Greenland and Canada), but rather in response to the consequences of recent imperial overreach.

The old US foreign policy, argues secretary of state Marco Rubio, is ‘obsolete’. Attempts to reshape the world through unrestrained globalisation and foreign interventions have not only failed, he says, but are now also a ‘weapon being used against us’.

Even the name of Trump’s movement, MAGA, says it all. Make America Great Again implies that it is not so great now. Trump’s promised ‘golden age’, if it arrives at all, will be forged in a new mercantilist era that has been gradually embraced as well in Europe and supercharged by China’s drive to world preeminence.

Right now, America looks dominant largely because its traditional competitors – like the UK, Japan and the EU – are all suffering markedly worse economic and demographic crises. By 2050, the populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain are all expected to drop significantly. Even China suffers from a diminishing workforce, an overreliance on manufactured exports, mass alienation among the young and educated, a massive real-estate collapse and capital flight.

However, other nations’ problems do not make America less vulnerable. The US’s own population growth has also slowed, and recent economic trends have mostly benefitted the affluent and those working for the government. The top 10 per cent of all earners now account for half of all spending. This is well above the roughly one-third of three decades ago. Partially this comes as many of the companies historically tied to high wages – US Steel, General Motors, RCA, Xerox, Intel and Boeing – have either disappeared or markedly declined.

Wall Street seems more concerned with making money from China than boosting the American economy. As American Prospect correctly points out, American investors are effectively funding China’s bid to displace the US as the world’s reigning superpower. America’s inability to build things – most notably commercial and military vessels – means that, even in terms of defence, its power is waning.

Trump came to office in large part in reaction to the abandonment of the national interest by the corporate and financial elites. According to one study, the growing trade deficit between the US and China cost us roughly 3.7million American jobs between 2001 and 2018. It was partially because of this abandonment of the working class by the global liberalised economy that Trump was able to win voters in once solidly Democratic industrial states, first in 2016 and then again last year.

Trump’s drive for tariffs makes sense in this light, particularly if the focus is to hurt the EU, where tariffs on US-made cars are four times higher than in the opposite direction. This is also often the case in such things as food, beverages and other agricultural products.

President Trump has called the EU’s trade policies an ‘atrocity’, as he attempts, however clumsily, to get America’s key trade partners to reduce their historically high protective barriers. His threats have also led some manufacturers to scrap plans to move production abroad. Honda has decided not to shift its production of new models to Mexico and has instead opted for Indiana. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and chipmaker TSMC have also been persuaded to invest billions to build new production sites in the US.

Mark Steyn’s Reversal of Fortune By Rael Jean Isaac

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

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago, Michael Mann was riding high after winning his 12-year-old lawsuit against journalist and pundit Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg over comments sharply critical of Mann’s famed “hockey stick” graph.  That graph purported to demonstrate a sharp rise in global temperature following industrialization, supposedly caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.  The offending comments were by Steyn in a National Review blog post and by Simberg in a Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog post.

Mann brought suit against all four, but in 2021 National Review and CEI won “summary judgment” (a peculiar term after nine years of litigation) on the grounds that Steyn and Simberg were “independent contractors,” not employees, and they bore no responsibility for the content of the posts.

In February 2024, a District of Columbia jury ordered Steyn to pay one million dollars in punitive damages to Mann.  (Although Steyn’s offense was chiefly to have quoted Simberg, the jury assessed only $1,000 for the latter.)

If Mann was joyous, Steyn was depressed and enraged.  He had spent twelve years in what he described as the “dank, fetid, clogged septic tank of DC justice.”  The case had ruined his finances and, as he often stated, his life.  And at the end, when it finally came to trial, far from being vindicated, he had been slammed with a huge penalty with the potential to destroy the rest of his life, already precarious in the wake of one massive and several lesser heart attacks.  An appeal would entail more years and huge additional legal costs.

Buoyed by the verdict, Mann promised to bring National Review and CEI (as institutions, presumably with deeper pockets) back into the case.  He said he believed that the summary judgment had been “wrongly decided.”  Mann announced, “They’re next.”

One year later, the tables had turned.  To understand what happened, it is necessary to know something of the legal underpinnings of the case.

Good News! The New York Times Has Found Its Candidate for 2028! A perfect choice considering the source. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/good-news-the-new-york-times-has-found-its-candidate-for-2028/

It’s early yet. A great deal is going to happen before the actual choosing of the 2028 Democratic presidential candidate that will upset any calculations that are being made now. Nevertheless, that isn’t stopping Democrats and non-Democrats alike from speculating as to who will emerge as the nominee of the Party of Enforced Insanity.

Kamala Harris has a big lead in the polls, but no one is particularly thrilled about that, least of all the Democrats who jumped off the cliff of Joy with her in 2024, and so the party top dogs are casting around with increasing desperation for someone to pull them out of the hole they’ve dug themselves into.

On Sunday, the New York Times picked its candidate (at least for now): it rolled out a puff piece over 1,500 words long, complete with flattering photos of the anointed candidate and earnest analysis of why she was the right choice for right-thinking people — that is, for the Times, left-thinking people. The choice of the moment for the New York Times is none other than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Swizzle Stick).

Yes, it’s really true. The New York Times is touting, as a viable presidential candidate, the congresswoman whose lack of basic knowledge of how the U.S. government works and other matters that you’d think even a bartender would know has made her an enduring object of ridicule among patriots. The congresswoman who has inspired ongoing speculation as to whether the “D” after her name stands for “Ditz.” The congresswoman who is so far to the left as to make Chairman Mao look like a capitalist roader. That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s precisely because AOC is so very far to the left that the Grey Lady wants our nation to turn its lonely eyes to her. “For the last decade,” the Times puff piece begins, “Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been running for president, planning a run for president or pushing former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to adopt more progressive policies.” By “progressive,” of course, the Times means statist, Washington-centered, federally controlled and authoritarian.

The Passing Signal Psychodrama How does this blunder rank with prior diplomatic and military screw-ups? by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-passing-signal-psychodrama/

When we finally learn the full melodrama of the so-called Signal 1-2 day “scandal” of inviting a leftwing, Trump-despising, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg onto a supposedly secure conference list, involving most of the top Trump security officials, lots of questions need asking and answering.

Most importantly, who exactly had Goldberg’s private number, and ostensibly (in error [?]) could have possibly inserted it into the cleared list of participants in the discussions? Why Goldberg, rather than some random person of some 345 million Americans?

So why in the world would any top Trump officials or their staffers ever even have Goldberg’s private contact information—given his quite public record of a) fabricating stories with unnamed sources, and b) suffering from a decade of chronic Trump derangement syndrome?

Did Goldberg know the mechanisms that had prompted and continued his stealthy presence on the secure discussions?

Why did citizen Goldberg not simply come clean on day one that he realized he was mistakenly included in key national security conference communications, to which he did not belong, and thus should be obviously excluded immediately? Why stealthily listen in for eleven some days? Was the idea of informing his hosts of his own improper presence too old-fashioned morality?

Did Goldberg’s publicizing these discreet discussions really affect in any way at all the otherwise completely successful mission to neutralize years of appeased Houthis aggression and begin to end their veritable destruction of Red Sea international maritime commerce?

Trump Shuts Down Antisemitic Activism at Columbia The times they are a-changin’. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-shuts-down-antisemitic-activism-at-columbia/

Columbia University, where student protesters in 1968 stormed and occupied many university buildings, forcing the resignation of the university’s president, is again at the center of the news for campus radicalism.

As FrontPage Mag has reported, Columbia grad student and green card-holding alien Mahmoud Khalil, spokesman for the pro-Hamas student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), has become what The New York Times called “the public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. In addition to participating in a takeover of the library at Columbia affiliate Barnard College, he has referred to the October 7 attacks as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that CUAD is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.”

To the shock and outrage of Jew haters on the Left, the Trump administration stepped in where the complicit Biden administration never would have, and arrested this terrorism-fomenting alien with possible deportation to follow.

“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at last week’s briefing. “This administration is not going to tolerate individuals having the privilege of studying in our country and then siding with pro-terrorist organizations that have killed Americans.”

And that’s not all. Trump also threatened to cancel $400 million in federal research contracts and grants to Columbia unless the school tightened disciplinary procedures and asserted greater control over academic departments to stem antisemitism at the school, particularly in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Taking Back Childhood from Phones—Finally Americans don’t agree about anything. Except this: Kids belong in the real world. Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch

https://www.thefp.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Anxious Generation was published one year ago today. Our plan was to promote the book in the spring, take the summer off to recharge, then get to work in September on Jon’s next book, a deeply depressing investigation of technology’s effects on democracy.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the book catalyzed a movement around the world. Most spectacularly, schools, states, and entire countries implemented phone-free school policies, and Australia raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16.

This went well beyond our wildest expectations of what could happen.

The question is why this change is unfolding so quickly—and what this mass movement says about the state of our culture and its prospects for renewal.

Wherever children have smartphones in their pockets and social media on those smartphones, family life turns into an eternal struggle over screen time. That’s been our reality for a while. Then came Covid-19.

For several years, children—deprived of school and every other normal social activity—were confined to their screens. As Covid restrictions faded away, the device addictions they had amplified did not. And that struggle between parents and their kids only intensified.

Charles Fain Lehman Burn a Tesla, Break Democracy Why domestic terrorism is a threat to the American way of life

https://www.city-journal.org/article/burn-vandalize-teslas-domestic-terrorism

Over the past month, anti-Trump agitators have found a new favorite target: Teslas. In response to Elon Musk’s war on bureaucracy, vandals in cities across the country have broken windows, punctured tires, and keyed doors of the popular electric vehicle. Some have even lit the cars on fire.

Various administration officials have labeled the acts “domestic terror.” Musk critics have brushed off these actions as the price of political participation or implied that they are a predictable backlash to his alleged extremism. Indeed, the most ardent defenders see the burning of cars as a proportional response—as one protester’s sign put it, “Burn a Tesla: Save Democracy.”

These efforts to blur the line between protest and terrorism, however, are profoundly undemocratic. The idea that property destruction and violence are legitimate forms of protest has deep roots on the left, but it is inimical to the freedom of expression that makes democratic life possible.

The Tesla bombers are reading from an old playbook. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American and European anarchists conducted bombing campaigns and other acts of political violence. They were inspired by theorist Peter Kropotkin’s “propaganda of the deed”—the idea that the expressive character of violence could help instigate revolution.

The revolutionary Soviets not only engaged in brutal violence but also actively justified it as a necessary precondition of their revolution. In Terrorism and Communism, for example, Leon Trotsky responds to a liberal critic by insisting that the revolutionary class has an obligation to use violent means to attain its ends.

Trump Should (Again) Cancel Open Intelligence Hearings on Worldwide Threats Trump should cancel open worldwide threat hearings, which have become security risks and political spectacles used by Democrats to undermine his administration. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/28/trump-should-again-cancel-open-intelligence-hearings-on-worldwide-threats/

Like previous years, Democrats used the recent “Signal-gate” affair to turn this week’s unclassified hearings on worldwide threats by the Senate and House intelligence committees into political circuses that did nothing to conduct critical oversight of America’s intelligence agencies.

This is why, as he did in 2019, President Trump should cancel all future open worldwide threat hearings by refusing to allow his intelligence officials to participate in them.

Worldwide threat hearings are held annually and feature top U.S. intelligence officials presenting testimony on the analysis of their agencies on a wide range of security threats facing our nation. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, NSA Director Timothy Haugh, and DIA Director Jeffrey Kruse testified to this year’s worldwide threat hearings.

These hearings are conducted in open, unclassified hearings followed by closed, classified sessions. There has long been concern that the open hearings pose significant and unnecessary security risks because America’s top intelligence officials discuss the current work of their agencies in front of the press. Despite assurances that this testimony is unclassified, it still provides extremely useful information to America’s adversaries on the focus, scope, and emphasis of U.S. intelligence. There is no question that videos of these hearings are closely watched and studied by hostile governments and their intelligence services.

The worldwide threats hearings have also become political spectacles that members of Congress often use to undermine presidential policy and gain face time on TV to promote themselves. Instead of using these hearings to understand dire security threats, committee members sometimes give self-serving speeches, bully witnesses, and press them to contradict presidential policies.