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April 2025

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s ‘resistance’ to Trump isn’t about science or academic freedom The school would rather lose $9 billion in federal funding than offend the left and give up woke indoctrination policies that enable and encourage antisemitism. Jonathan Tobin

By on April 16th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/harvards-resistance-to-trump-isnt-about-science-or-academic-freedom/?utm_campaign=

It’s nice to know that the school that is widely considered to be the most prestigious institution of higher education in the United States is willing to stand up for its principles. Unfortunately, the main principle for which Harvard University is standing up—and earning deafening applause from liberal elites in politics and the media—is the right to go on enabling and encouraging the hatred of Jews.

Of course, that’s not the way the political left is spinning the announcement that Harvard would defy the demands of the Trump administration to cease its tacit support of the surge of antisemitism since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

For Trump’s “progressive” opponents who have acquired near-total control of higher education in the United States, the demands are unacceptable. They would rather lose federal funding, which is crucial to their survival, than end discrimination in admissions and hiring rooted in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that creates viewpoint uniformity that excludes conservatives and supporters of Israel. They also refuse to adopt disciplinary policies against those who advocate for Jewish genocide and harass Jewish students, or prevent the pro-Hamas mobs on their campuses from wearing masks while they commit their acts of intimidation and violence.

For the far left, their refusal to treat antisemites the way they would bigots who threatened African-Americans or Hispanics is a heroic act of “resistance.”

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

China’s Cybersecurity ‘Pearl Harbor’ Against America: ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’ by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21550/china-cyber-war-against-america

For decades, Communist China’s spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the forced transfer of technology from vulnerable US corporate enterprises drawn to the vast Chinese market. Little has been accomplished to reduce this massive theft of intellectual property. US businesses seem to have resigned themselves to such unfair practices as the price of doing business in China.

In the last two years, however, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cyber-attacks against America have undergone a deadly shift that seriously threatens the US’s capability to prevail in any open conflict with China.

The second revolutionary advance in China’s offensive cyber-warfare capabilities that target US interests is more deadly. It threatens a Pearl Harbor-magnitude attack on America. “Volt Typhoon,” aka “Vanguard Panda,” involves the stealthy insertion of potentially debilitating malware into the computer systems that control critical nodes of US infrastructure.

“[W]e have been, over the years, trying to play better and better defense when it comes to cyber. We need to start going on offense and start imposing, I think, higher costs and consequences to private actors and nation state actors that continue to steal our data, that continue to spy on us, and that even worse, with the Volt Typhoon penetration, that are literally putting cyber time bombs on our infrastructure, our water systems, our grids, even our ports.” — Mike Waltz, shortly before he was appointed National Security Adviser, CBS News, December 15, 2024.

Trump might also convene a cabinet meeting to assure that all aspects of American public and private capabilities should be mobilized to build resiliency in critical national infrastructure, while simultaneously examining US cyberspace vulnerabilities.

The US also might also go on the offense and target China’s critical national infrastructure, perhaps starting with the Cyberspace Administration of China?

China’s multidimensional war against US interests is already underway and well-documented. One underappreciated dimension of its attack on American primacy, however, is the arena of cybersecurity.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard, Has $53B, Still Wants Billions in Fed Funding Americans are supposed to feel privileged to give Harvard their money. by Daniel Greenfield

By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-has-53b-still-wants-billions-in-fed-funding/

Harvard has an endowment of over $53 billion. Despite that it’s fighting Trump administration demands for reform in order to extract around $9 billion in federal funding.

The Trump administration had asked Harvard for such things as merit-based hiring, promotion and admission, empowering tenured faculty over activist groups, and viewpoint diversity. It also called for an end to DEI and antisemitism.

It warned that “Harvard must adopt a new policy on student groups or clubs that forbids the recognition and funding of, or provision of accommodations to, any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment” and “permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student”.

Finally, Harvard “must also, to the satisfaction of the federal government, disclose the source and purpose of all foreign funds”.

Harvard predictably said “no”. President Alan Garber declared that “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The trouble is that governments have been doing this for quite a while. And if Harvard doesn’t like it, it can stop taking federal money.

Instead, the Harvard president argues that “for three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘If we stopped using fossil fuels today, billions would die’ Bjorn Lomborg on Net Zero, nuclear energy and why polar bears aren’t going extinct.

By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/14/if-we-stopped-using-fossil-fuels-today-billions-would-die/

The belief that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time isn’t only ill-informed, it’s dangerous. So says climate economist Bjorn Lomborg, author of Best Things First and False Alarm. Lomborg sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss the disastrous economic impact of climate alarmism, particularly in the UK and Europe, and whether we are at the dawn of a better way forward. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Fraser Myers: Scepticism towards Net Zero seems to be going mainstream. Presumably, you see this as a welcome development?

Bjorn Lomborg: It’s certainly a good thing that we’re more realistic. Remember, climate change is a real problem. But it’s not the end of the world. It’s not as though there is a meteor hurtling towards Earth, and nothing else matters, which is how the conversation has been going for the past 10-15 years. This view has led to a lot of really bad policies.

Now, it’s still a problem. I don’t want to go all the way to the other side of the argument and just say ‘drill, baby, drill’, and stop caring about the climate. The important thing is to stop doing all of the stupid stuff that is costing us trillions of dollars, but isn’t helping to fix climate change. Let’s fix climate change, but let’s do it in a cheaper, more effective and smarter way.

Myers: Can you explain why Net Zero has had such a terrible impact on the economy, particularly in Europe?

Lomborg: Fundamentally, if you’re speaking about Net Zero, you very easily end up with a renewables-only approach. Solar and wind are the favourite policies at the moment. The problem is, of course, that you can’t run an economy on something that only works sometimes.

Wind and solar are great when the Sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but at other times the cost is tremendous. Most countries have storage capacity for 10 or 20 minutes of renewable power. But you need capacity for two or three months.

The more wind and solar you have, the higher the cost of energy. No country on Earth has lots of solar and wind and cheap energy. That’s why heavy industry has left Germany, because businesses can’t afford the cost of solar and wind. Instead, they move to the US or China, where energy is cheap.

By aggressively pursuing Net Zero, Germans have done something to make themselves feel good. But unless you have China, India and Africa onboard, you’re missing out on most of the emissions in the 21st century. The reality is that you’re not going to show the way by impoverishing yourself. They will look at Germany and see it as an example of what to avoid.

Myers: Is nuclear energy a viable solution here?

Lomborg: Absolutely. And the fundamental point is that, if you have paid for and built nuclear power plants, you should definitely not decommission them. Unfortunately, that is the mistake that Germany, the US and many other countries around the world have made. That’s just stupid, because you have a free, green energy supply that could last you up to 30 years.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Negotiations With The Mullahs By Bruce Thornton Let’s hope this isn’t another Western fool’s errand.

By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-negotiations-with-the-mullahs/

Recently an important report about President Trump and Iran was drowned out by the weeping and wailing over the president’s Liberation Day increases on tariffs. According to Park MacDougald on The Scroll, Axios reported that the president is “seriously considering an Iranian proposal for indirect nuclear talks” . . . and “the administration is now exploring next steps in order to begin conversations and trust building with the Iranians.”

More troubling, MacDougald writes, “Phillip Smyth emphasized that the Iranians, despite holding an extraordinarily weak hand, are effectively offering the White House nothing: no direct talks, no negotiation over ballistic missiles or the regime’s support for its regional proxies, and nuclear negotiation only within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal.”

We shouldn’t underestimate the president’s commitment to deterrence, or doubt his will to follow through on his pledge to prevent Iran from going nuclear. He has brought back “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, and deployed six long-range B2 stealth bombers to the joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean––the only bomber able to drop “bunker buster” MOPS, “Massive Ordnance Penetrators,” 30,000-pound, precision-guided bombs capable of penetrating Iran’s underground hardened nuclear production facilities.

Also, as Smyth points out, Iran is the weakest it has been since its 1980-88 war with Iraq. Its proxies in the region have been neutralized, its economy is on the brink of collapse, its currency is approaching Weimar Germany levels of inflation, and its people are boldly disgruntled and increasingly restless. Now may be the best opportunity to end Iran’s nuclear ambition to destroy, Israel, which it mocks as a “one-bomb state.” Nor should we assume that self-preservation from a threatened repayment in nuclear kind will restrain the mullahs.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Renu Mukherjee Why Did a Star Columbia Student Join an Anti-Semitic Mob? Yunseo Chung’s descent into pro-Hamas activism reveals a tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood.

By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.

Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Not to Deal with the Student Mob The line between free speech and violence is clear University leaders & public officials must uphold it; too few are trying Charles Lipson

By on April 15th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/deal-student-mob-campus-protest/

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West.

At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages.

Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.  “I don’t think this is a prison case,” he said.

The violent protests are Stanford are hardly the only ones on campus, and the spring protest season is just getting started. At Case Western University in Ohio, students caused over $400,000 in damage by smearing buildings with red paint. Expect more to come at universities where the violence goes unpunished and prosecutors are as weak-kneed as the one in Santa Clara.

Campus violence, destruction, harassment and intimidation are more than criminal. They are also direct attacks on the basic purpose of our educational institutions. They undermine our nation’s core value of free, non-violent speech and assembly, encoded in the First Amendment.

If university leaders and local law enforcement are unwilling to protect those rights, if they are unwilling to sanction those who violate them, then they are opening the door for others who will act to protect those values and those endangered students.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shapiro v. Clooney: Two Democrat Parties The Harrisburg attack on the Pennsylvania governor.

By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/shapiro-v-clooney-two-democrat-parties/

EXCERPT

The current occupant is Governor Josh Shapiro. The governor, a Democrat, is, like a couple of his predecessors, also Jewish. 

Did that last fact launch the 2:00 in the morning attack on the governor this past Sunday? In which attacker Cody Balmer, 38, managed to squeeze through the black iron fence surrounding the Mansion, break a window, and toss two Molotov cocktails inside, setting the building on fire while the governor and family were sound asleep inside. A fire that did serious damage to a section of the history-laden building. (RELATED: The Left Loves Political Violence)

At this moment, Balmer’s motives beyond an expressed dislike for Shapiro are not known. There is, without doubt, a belief by many — the governor included (and I’m one as well) — that this attack was indeed motivated by antisemitism.

The governor was awakened by state police guards pounding on his door who quickly evacuated the governor and his family, which included four children, two dogs, and a visiting family member.

On Monday, Shapiro faced the TV cameras and read a statement that said, in part:

This type of violence is not okay. I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, one particular person or another, it is not okay, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.

Well, amen to that. The governor has it exactly right.

Now. Let’s contrast this statement to a new Broadway play from another Democrat altogether — left-wing movie star George Clooney.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Inflation Cools Off: Media Hardest Hit They are losing the voters, who have finally decided to end an abusive relationship. David Catron

By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/inflation-cools-off-media-hardest-hit/

The general consensus among informed political analysts is that the Republicans emerged from last November’s election in control of the White House and Congress due to the border crisis and persistent inflation. The Trump administration curtailed the influx of illegal immigrants with remarkable speed and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March suggests that inflation is also returning to the modest levels that prevailed throughout President Trump’s first term. The CPI declined by .01 percent last month, a year-over-year rate of 2.4 percent, while core inflation sank to a four-year low.

The cure for inflation required no legislative crackdown on price-gouging. All we really needed was a new president.

Moreover, wholesale prices also decreased in March. According to the Producer Price Index (PPI) report, an important indicator of future inflation pressure, “Prices for final demand goods moved down 0.9 percent in March, the largest decrease since falling 1.4 percent in October 2023.” These PPI statistics, combined with the CPI numbers, clearly portend a brighter future for long suffering consumers and the nation’s economy in general. But the legacy media are loathe to report good news if it reflects well on the new Trump administration. Instead, they search for some black cloud to tarnish every silver lining, and subject the electorate to the kind of fear mongering that pervades the following passage from a story published by the Washington Post:

As consumers and businesses face widespread uncertainty around the Trump administration’s whipsawing trade policies, a widely followed survey from the University of Michigan found that consumers’ expectations for the next year’s inflation jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981. It’s the fourth consecutive month that consumer sentiment has worsened, as people across demographics say they believe unemployment and inflation will get substantially worse.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Trump Fix His FUBAR Tariff Rollout?

By on April 15th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/15/can-trump-fix-his-fubar-tariff-rollout/

So far, President Donald Trump has been piloting his second term like Maverick from “Top Gun.” With one exception. The tariff rollout has been FUBAR, which is troubling since it’s Trump’s signature economic policy issue.

There have been glaring missteps along the way, repeated pauses, confused and conflicting messaging, turf wars. It’s draining public support and causing real economic problems as businesses can’t make plans while all this is in flux.

We aren’t privy to insider gossip to speculate why this is. But we can say that Trump needs to get his tariff act together, and fast.

Consider what has transpired in just the past two weeks:

Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement turned out to be a disaster. Not just because an island inhabited only by penguins was listed as a trade abuser, but because it quickly became apparent that the math used to set tariff rates made no sense.

While Trump called the tariffs reciprocal, they weren’t. They were instead based on trade imbalances with other nations, which even Trump supporters pointed out is a flawed metric.

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