RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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.

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.